That I May Slay Wild Beasts
by igsygrace
Summary: Hunger Games, Canon Divergent. Romance, generally.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One

* * *

no light thing is it for singers to forget her – whose study is the bow and the shooting of hares and the spacious dance and sport upon the mountains. Callimachus, Hymn to Artemis

* * *

Peeta opened his eyes and for the space of two blinks, he was comfortable and at peace. The afternoon light dazzled his vision and there was a whisper in his ears, the gentle hiss of a stream, and everything around him was more green and more blue than he had ever even imagined back in the days when he put ink to paper.

Then, on the third blink, the pain split his leg and he shouted out before he could stop himself. Damn - fucking damn it! He had never regretted waking out of unconsciousness more.

Forcing himself into a sitting position, he propped his body up with his right hand (only to slightly sink as the soft mud gave under the weight) and vaguely swiped at his left leg with his left hand. He couldn't quite reach the wound, but oh shit … the fucking pain. His head felt light and heavy at the same time, and a rising panic made his breath shallow. He was in trouble. Exceptional trouble. No one knew where he was … and he could hardly hope to be found, anyway. That would entail trouble of another sort. He was in more than exceptional trouble. He was dead.

If he couldn't move, he was dead. ...

The second time he woke up, he was lying in a slick smear of his own green vomit. It took longer for him to feel the pain, and it was duller now, but strange - hot and throbbing. Everything was really hot - although it was now dark, heavy and dark. The black velvet sky and the thick field of stars was draped over him - so close-seeming, he thought for a moment he was just lying under a blanket, squeezing his eyes shut to make the patterns of dancing light. But no, that was a boy, a boy ….

He moaned out loud. It didn't really matter, now. He was caught like a - no, actually - he _was_ a wounded animal, caught and helpless. And he was going to die like one. No - he struggled against that thought. No. Not like this. Though Panem offered little better for its District citizens. But he had been lucky, so far.

The third time he woke up, it was to find that he had gone blind.

He clawed desperately at his face, confused to find something soft and dark binding his eyes shut. His fingers curled around it to yank and pull, but they were stopped in the motion abruptly as someone - some human someone - grasped them.

"Stop."

The voice was low and a little hoarse - feminine and unfamiliar.

"Who are you?"

"None of your business. Just shush and keep still."

Out of one danger into another, he thought. So - he might not die here, in the woods. But he would not - probably - escape death. He was far from home, illicitly so.

He had already come to terms with death, so it was with a detached curiosity that he listened to the strange sounds around him. There was a series of metallic clinks and groans … a pressure on his numb leg. A small gasp from the mysterious woman. Then a sudden release of pressure and an abrupt return of the pain in his leg.

"Ah!" he cried.

"That hurts?" she asked. Then, not waiting for his answer: "Good. That's a good sign."

Distressed, he made another move toward the blindfold. But her voice stopped him. "Don't! Not yet. I'd have to kill you."

"You're going to anyway," he panted.

"We'll see."

And at that, he was still.

What happened after was muddled by a haze of pain and discomfort. She pulled him to his feet and he was free, though in pain, and he leaned against her (she was short, but he could feel the hard muscles of her arms and shoulders) hobbling blindly over the uneven terrain, the rough grass scratching his legs. Frequently, he stumbled and she stopped and caught him, every time. He could feel her impatience - it stiffened her muscles, it tightened her voice. But she only spoke encouragement. And by the time she finally, finally stopped, ducking him down into a low, dark place, he had grown accustomed to her voice, and found it almost pleasing. And vaguely familiar.

The blindfold was abruptly removed and he blinked at the low, steady light until his surroundings came into focus. He was sitting in a dark concrete room, the windows covered in leafy branches. The room showed crude signs of long-term occupation: a bearskin rug, a couple of roughly woven baskets, some wooden cups and plates. A fishing pole, a bow, and some long wooden stakes rested in a corner.

Finally, he looked up, and his mouth dropped open. She was standing over him, legs slightly apart, her hands on her hips. She wore a loose grungy t-shirt, hem fraying and hole-y. Her breeches looked to be a patchwork of hides, sewn together with large leather stitches. Her dark hair was coiled away behind her - her face was covered in a mask of gray mud, but ….

"I think I could put a name to you," she said, anticipating him.

"And I you," he replied. "Though I would be wrong. Katniss Everdeen died almost ten years ago."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

* * *

 _There Artemis of the showering arrows ... healed his wound and cared for him._ Homer. The Iliad.

* * *

That, of course - the illusion of Katniss Everdeen - was a fever dream, he thought later, his body in the grip of a fire so intense that he thought he was standing in the middle of an inferno, his flesh and soul melting away. Slowly, slowly, the shadows in the dark concrete room stretched up, loomed over him. They made vaguely human-like shapes as they moved along the walls, encircling him steadily, as if they were the escorts sent to him from Death. Steady in the middle of the morphing shades was the silhouette of the woman - dark and steady - sitting watchful among the phantoms. His eyes were hazy, gauzy, phlegmy and he could not see her body - he could only stare at her shadow on the wall and wonder who she was.

Of course, he thought he saw the girl. _He always saw the girl_ , long after he had accepted that he never would again. Once, Meliora had spontaneously started braiding her wet hair - it had looked darker than normal - and it had moved him in a strange, gut-twisting way. Then, he had said and done some things that in retrospect … but were hard to back out of, once done ... and anyway, what did it matter? What did it matter?

 _Melly_ , he moved his mouth and tried to say her name out loud. But it came out all wrong - "Kat-niss," his voice said. It had been years and years since he had said the name aloud. Not that anyone would ever have known the significance of her name on his lips. But he had sealed it away, anyway, keeping the secret, still - it was the only thing that remained. So, it must be kept; once told, he felt, it would vanish into the ether, leaving him deflated, emptied of the one thing that had ever really mattered.

And now, in a fever dream, he was expelling it, disgorging it. He could not stop saying the name of the dead girl whom he had loved in silence. "Katniss," he gasped.

"Shh," said the woman, and he felt something wet and warm draped over his forehead. His skin sizzled at the contact, and then, slowly, coolness spread over him, like a breeze blowing suddenly through the midsection of a summer day.

The shush of her voice worked like a drug and his eyes closed, slowly, taking him from darkness to darkness and, although he knew that to sleep was to potentially sleep forever, he could not resist exhaustion.

"You're awake," she said.

He blinked. It was lighter now, and his eyes were clearer. He felt weak, exhausted, sore. But much better.

He looked down at himself and started to find himself naked. Or nearly, at least. He wore nothing but his undershorts. His left calf was wrapped in some soft pelt, and now memories flooded him - his reckless venture into the woods, the call of the stream - the sharp and sudden pain as the trap snapped over his leg, leaving him helpless and dying.

He looked back up at her and squinted - trying not to see Katniss Everdeen, but failing hopelessly. He had never spoken to her - rarely got close enough to her to even attempt speech. But those gray eyes - pearly gray, shifting in the light, catching her moods as real pearls catch colors: at turns sharp, sulky, bright, questing, calculating - he would know anywhere. So - was he even?

"Am I?" he croaked.

"Yes, but not out of the woods," she replied, brusquely. "I got your fever down, but your injury is bad. I can set your leg and bind the wound, but that was a rusty trap and -."

"Was that your - bear trap?"

"Bear trap?" she laughed, but harshly. "If that was a bear trap, you'd be dead, most likely. Anyway, your leg would probably have to come clean off. That was one of the Capitol's old traps - meant to capture rebels, not kill them."

"What - from the Dark Days? That would make it almost a hundred years old."

"Very good," she said sarcastically. "Your sense of time and space is returning."

Peeta was silent at this, wondering what he might have said while fevered. Well, whatever it was, he could not be held to it. Surely not. Something to work out later. For now, he was flooded with questions for the present. Everything was impossible. "I thought - we all thought - you were dead," he said.

"Good," she said. "You were meant to."

He shook his head and looked at her face. She looked so much the same. She was lean, small and lithe. He remembered her with a hungry look - a wolfishness to her eyes, a certain gauntness. That was gone, but in its place on her body was the hardness of whatever life she was leading now. She was tautly muscled, compact; no ounce of her was at waste. "No, but -."

She held up her hand. "First, shush. Speak softer. Second - try to imagine the position I'm in, believed by District 12 to be dead, but now witnessed not to be. And then try to imagine the position you're in."

He raised his eyebrows. "You mean - you will have to kill me?" he asked, only half joking.

"I didn't say that. But wouldn't it be wise for a person - in your position - not to ask too many questions?"

Of course, of course. But he had them, anyway. And - someone had been charged with, hauled away for, her death. Probably executed, though once one was extradited to the Capitol, there was never really knowing - unless you were in the Games, of course.

"So," she said, "Peeta Mellark - you survived the Reapings."

It was as if she had the uncanny ability to walk right into his head and read his thoughts. And now _he_ shrunk from the conversation … this touched one of the darkest, most painful periods of his own life. He had spent long years deliberately not thinking about the Reapings. He did not want to go back there. "In the sense that I'm still alive," he replied, finally. "Yes. But the horrible secret to the Reapings is … you don't really survive them."

"What the hell does that mean?"

He shook his head. What was clear now was that she - and it was remarked at the time, but the scandal of the arrest had buried all other discussion - had disappeared from the District - she and her younger sister, Primrose - at exactly the moment that Primrose was about to enter the Reapings. So, perhaps she wouldn't be able to understand. "If you don't go, it's only because - people took your place. I think - everyone lives with that. Even if they don't realize it."

So many more questions now. Where was her sister? And what had been Gale's involvement in all this, after all?

"Until the people start blaming the Capitol more than they blame themselves, the Games will never end," she responded.

She thinks we're weak, _cowards_ , he thought. And she's right about that.

But it still didn't seem very fair. Not when people had stayed - and died for it.

"Both things are true," he replied. "Look," he added. "People will come looking for me."

"Yes." Softly, this. The softer her voice got, he thought, the deadlier it sounded.

He wriggled his leg, testing it for sensation. It felt swollen and numb.

"You're not getting far on that thing," she said.

"I don't want to give you up. If you could - leave me with some food or something. Enough for a few days."

She shook her head, emphatically. "I have business in these parts. I can't leave, yet. If we could get you fixed up …." she bit her lip and frowned down at him.

"Yes?"

"You could be of some use to me."

She was strange, he thought - at one moment bristling with distrust, hiding her secrets - the next plainspeaking and familiar; she seemed to have some trust in him, perhaps despite herself, and he wondered - he wondered if she remembered. "I absolutely could," he said, but his enthusiasm was dampened with a thought that came straight from his own strangeness, from the place inside him that had never been normal: _I don't want to leave her. Not so soon._

She laughed. "You honestly don't know how badly off you are. Oh, well. You need to eat. So do I."

She left him alone with his thoughts, which were so wild he could barely keep pace. It had all happened at once - the disappearance in early summer and then that dreadful Reaping. If he could gut that particular year from his head, he would - and gladly. He had tried for so long to do it. And, though happiness had never come to him, a certain amount of contentment had. Now that was torn asunder, like the girls' dresses, found in the woods - covered in blood.

Blood. It had spattered the screen in an exact moment of the Games that year, hiding for a second the awful killing, the body savaged by the wolf mutt in the arena. And he had vomited, vomited - spraying the bathroom above the bakery with his bile. He had vomited until white flakes from his stomach lining came up, and then blood.

When she came back in, he was trembling. She had a small tin pot, steaming with something that made his empty stomach twist horribly. She poured the contents into two of her rough wooden cups, then knelt down next to him to help him drink. When he tried to lift his arms to intercept her, he found he could barely move them.

Her braid slipped loose from its coil and draped itself over his shoulder while she gently tipped his head back and put the cup to his lips. It was turkey broth - he knew this flavor well. It had never tasted better. He listened to her breathe while the warm liquid drizzled down his throat and warmed his insides. His listened to his heart. It was rapid, and perhaps not just with the fever.

When it was her turn to eat, he watched her and he said: "I still can't believe I'm talking to you. And you … you said you remembered me?"

She didn't look at him, but stared down into her cup. "Why would I not remember you, Peeta Mellark?" She frowned. "I owe you. I owe you. And a debt is a difficult thing - to shake."

In the silence following this remark, he heard the sound of the birds that were greeting the descending dusk. A cheerful-enough sound, if taken in isolation. But he associated the evening birds - owl and nightjar, mockingbird and nightingale - with the struggles of his late teens, with the depression and the dissolution of his family ties. Of haunting the Meadow until twilight, of sleeping in late and losing friends, jobs and all sense of himself.

"What?" he said. "What do you owe me?"

The look she gave him was an exact replication. Confusion, surprise, the swift descent of joy and most of all hunger, desperate hunger. Remembered as keenly as it was experienced. Then her face adjusted itself back into the present - lean and cool. "My thanks, at the minimum. My life - possibly my life."

He gasped a little - he couldn't help himself. Once upon a time, he had given a starving girl some bread. He had been proud of the act, duly proud. But he had never even thought of it in such broad strokes. He stumbled over the words. "I only did what I thought I … I only did what anyone …."

"Then why were you the only one?"

He averted his eyes, looked down at his limp fingers, at his bare white legs. The pain was slight, but it felt hot and swollen. "Well - I think your debt's more than paid off, Katniss Everdeen. You can safely forget me now."

He looked up in time to see her grin - it was the first look of genuine delight; conversely, it made him feel unsettled and a bit guilty, and he wasn't sure why. "You're the one who needs to forget," she answered.

"Forget? I don't think … that's not something I think I can do."

And that was why. Because he wanted to say things like that and he shouldn't say things like that. Because it had taken exactly one second for everything to come back - all his shy affection and the nascent desire. And now - he was older, more experienced - sadder, far more cynical. But there was an eleven year old boy inside him, still, at the intersection of childhood and adolescence, everything innocent and sexual swirled together. Where the feelings began and ended, it was too complicated to say - there was light and laughter, there was the desire to touch the girl's cheek, just brush her lips with the tip of his thumbs. Just to know what they felt like. And that would be too much - and he knew that if he had ever dared to do it, he would immediately withdraw, blushing from embarrassment, blushing also from what he would later know was desire.

One time, he had danced with a girl called Catrine, and it was all because her name was so similar. But when they had locked fingers, the scent of her was both like flowers and like skin and he had felt - for a second - like both pushing her away and pulling her in, parting her hands and her hair and her lips.

But it hadn't taken. Not like she had. And he had spent years getting over her. Only to find out that he hadn't.

"What do you mean?" she was asking him, the fuzzy question inevitable and completely unanswerable.

"The girl," he replied shakily, "who was murdered in the woods? If people have stopped talking about Katniss Everdeen, it's only just recently."

"Murdered?" she asked, her brow furrowing. "What made you all think I was murdered?"

"Wait - isn't that what you meant? When you said we were meant to think you were dead?"

"Dead in the woods - not murdered. Why murdered?"

He opened his mouth to answer before realizing that his answer was not an answer. _Because someone was accused of your murder._ That made no sense, now. Since she was alive, someone had been falsely accused. This shifted the world as he had understood it for the last ten years of his life. "It was - assumed, I guess," he stammered. "I don't know. I was sixteen and there were just - these rumors and speculation. The discussion was with the Peacekeepers - we all just were left to wonder."

That wasn't the entire truth. Of course, murder had not been the original speculation. The girls who fled to the woods ended up dead - that is the fate of girls who flee to the woods. Then other things were said, and other things … and the feeling of helplessness - his anger at the universe for taking away the girl had focused on a single target. And he had been happy to see someone punished for the crime ….

She had accepted his explanation - at least, she had not made the logical conclusion. And she moved on to the next topic. "What were _you_ doing in the woods?" she asked him.

"Your mother sent me," he said. "Actually."

"My mother?" she choked. She half looked away from him. "I don't believe you."

"No, it's true. I was desperate for something strong to treat headaches. She said - it was rare to find growing wild around here, but you could occasionally run into a plant called feverfew. I thought - it was worth a shot. In fact - if you look in my pants, she drew me a picture."

"You must get terrible migraines," she said, reaching for his pants, which were folded on the floor nearby. "To risk the woods and roaming murderers."

"It's not for me, and it's not -."

"How is she?" she cut across him. "My mother?"

He pursed his lips as he stared at her. She was looking down at the folded up paper she had retrieved from his pocket. There were things he would not tell her. How her mother had spent a month in custody after the daughters had disappeared, for aiding and abetting their flight. She lost her modest house in the Seam, was homeless for awhile. Sympathy (once the murder charges had been made) and generosity - especially from, of all places, the town drunk and resident Victor, Haymitch Abernathy - had got her set up again, eventually, in another small house in the Seam, where she worked as an apothecary, of sorts, for the miners and the poor of District 12. Like himself.

"Does she know? That you're alive?"

Katniss shifted her weight and sighed. "It's been many years since I've been able to leave her word. And I could never be sure - absolutely sure - that she ever got it."

"Well," he said. "She keeps herself busy. Dispenses medicinal herbs, when she can. Treats burns, broken legs, your basic injuries."

"Headaches?"

"... Headaches, yes," he said. "In this way," he added, "I could be useful. I could get her a message."

"Peeta," she said, shaking her head. She reached for him, specifically for the pelt she had wrapped around his leg. He held his breath, watching her. Liking the feel of her long fingers on his knee. Dreading the revelation.

He swallowed. His leg was punctured with the pattern of the teeth of the trap that had grabbed him. Where the bone had been broken, there was a bulge, purple and red. But worst of all was the least-noticeable discoloration - the red streaks reaching from the largest of the wounds, up towards his knee.

Blood poisoning. So - it all didn't matter. He was dying, anyway.

"So, you see," she said in that soft, deadly voice. "You see my dilemma."


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

* * *

The very music of the name has gone

Into my being, and each pleasant scene

Is growing fresh before me as the green

Of our own valleys

john keats. endymion.

* * *

She stood for awhile in the doorway of the little concrete room, her back to him - just staring out at the night sky, as if looking for some kind of sign. He watched her, trying to decide how to feel about this situation. He had several reasons - some of them selfish, some decidedly not - to root for his own life.

"What's the business you have?" he asked. "Around here?"

Without stirring, she replied, "Getting messages to people in the District - my mother, for one. I hoped to persuade her to - come with me."

"Where?" he asked, licking his lips.

She turned around at that, and he smiled at her.

"Dead men spill no secrets," he said.

"Yes, but - would it make any sense to you, even if I did tell you? It's just a place - a place that is not one of the Districts."

"And your sister is there?"

"Yes."

"How far away …." But he trailed off at the sharp shake of her head. "OK, OK. I'm just curious." Then - because, what did it matter, now? - he said: "I don't know why she didn't before. I would. I would have then. I definitely would now."

"Now, that's a lie. Merchants have enough to eat - you're spared the Reaping. Why would you leave?"

"Well - first of all, that's not necessarily the case. And, anyway, no gap between how the merchants live and the miners is big enough to cover up the fact that - that we're not free."

"Then why don't you all do something about it?" she asked him, then turned around and walked out the door.

He settled down and rested his head on his naked arms. His face was so hot that he thought, fuzzily, that he might be burning his skin off. Funny, this strange feeling of content. He'd witnessed something like it before. Right before the nicer of his grandmothers had died she had, after a long period of excruciating pain, reached a point where the agony receded just enough so that she could focus on the peaceful prospect of her death and the end to it. For a few hours, she had held his hand and spoke to him about every little thing that came to her mind - rambling, in a way, but there had been a thread running throughout her ramblings. All her keenest memories had come back to her in those last hours - and she relayed them, not in chronological order, but in a way that made sense to her - one memory firing up the next, one after another, until she was done.

One's life, it appeared, dissolved down to a handful of such memories. At the end.

There was a girl in the rain. A girl singing in the sun. A girl braiding her wet hair. (And the mourning sensation that this was a real death - his letting go and moving on.) A slap on the face. A bloody dress. Blood hitting the television screen. Blood on the floor. Blood everywhere, on the sheets and blankets, on his hands while he tried to hold back the inevitable.

"Peeta Mellark!"

He slid into a dream - a very familiar dream - and heard Effie Trinket's voice again, calling his name.

He had been sick ever since Katniss' disappearance, and since he could not explain what was wrong with him - neither could the healer, who speculated it was a disorder of the immune system. Was it possible to die of a broken heart? Maybe not - he had survived. But it was certainly possible to flunk out of school, throw your family into complete chaos and wreck your body. On Reaping Day, he had still been recovering - trying to just start eating again, to put on some more weight, to pull himself together.

In dreams he always completed the task that in real life had gone undone: walked slowly and steadily up to the stage. Trembling, at first, but eventually still and silent, staring down at the faces in the crowd. After that, the dreams would twist and turn in various ways. He would be dressed for the Capitol, stripped for the arena. He would be chased and chased all over fields and rocks, through woods and streams, by a variety of foes. Wolf mutts, Careers, his brother. Whatever.

When he woke up, panting and sweating, he was still alone. Perhaps she had done the sensible thing and just abandoned him ( _again_ , he thought before he could help himself). Perhaps she had gone hunting, foraging, walking through the woods. Perhaps she had been seen, caught, or fled -.

"Hey," she said, her silhouette appearing suddenly in the doorway. "You're awake."

He struggled to sit up, collapsed back down on his elbows. "I was worried about you."

She lifted her eyebrows. "Worry about yourself," she replied.

On her soft feet, she crossed the room and knelt down next to him, felt his forehead and frowned to herself. "More broth," she said.

"I'm not that hungry."

"You need to keep your strength up."

He grabbed her hand and pulled it away from his face. She was icy cold. "Why?" he asked her. "The sooner I die - the sooner I'm out of your hair."

She looked down at their clasped hands, almost quizzically. "I don't operate that way, Mellark. Besides - like I told you. I owe you."

She detached herself and stood up, half turning to walk away, and desperation made his voice burst out of him, more harshly than he intended: "Not as much as you think you do."

"What do you mean?" she asked in that soft voice.

"Maybe I had selfish motives," he said, catching and holding her eyes. "For chucking you that bread. Maybe - I wanted -."

"What?"

He shook his head. But, he reminded himself, his impending death erased the possibility for any fears of future embarrassment. So ... "I had a crush on you," he confessed, looking down now, down his flushed chest and down to his swollen leg, bruised green and purple. "For forever. But I - I couldn't get up the nerve to tell you - to talk to you at all. Even after all that …."

She shook her head. It felt like a rejection - like the very reason he had kept silent - and this hurt him with a surprisingly visceral pain. "It was still an act of kindness. You don't know - you don't understand. It was not just that you saved me - physically - from dying. And my sister, and my mother. It was that you saved me from despairing completely about human nature. I knew then - that it was not completely hopeless to be alive in the world. That there was something about my own life worth preserving. It made me fight."

He gaped at her. He wondered if - had he at any time known this - it would have changed the way things went for him. "No, I had no idea," he said. "I went on the opposite journey." He didn't add - it was unfair, so he couldn't add - that her 'death' had had almost everything to do with this.

He blinked a couple of times, then startled himself by waking up out of a sleep. It was some time later - the afternoon sun was slanting directly into the little room - and she was curled up next to him, sleeping herself. He could look directly into her face and marveled at how she managed to withdraw herself, even at rest. Her lips were tucked in - there were hollows in her cheeks. She was completely still - only a soft movement betrayed that she was breathing. There was still something so ethereal about her - there was still some part of him that was not convinced that she was really here in the flesh.

It didn't help that there was a haziness to everything, like the light wasn't hitting his eyes quite right. Everything was shadowed, all colors muted. He focused on the minute dimpling of her skin - a scar at her temple - the smudge of dirt on her forehead, all that remained of her mud mask from before. Anything that connected her to the earth. He took a deep breath.

And she stirred suddenly, as if woken by an alarm. Her eyes popped open and she sat up - all in the same motion. She swept the room with her gaze, then, smiling slightly, looked at him. "I needed that," she said. "Mellark …."

"That's my father's name," he said. "Call me Peeta."

"Peeta, then - Peeta," she licked her lips, as if tasting the word, and he watched her. "Tell me about District 12. Do you know Madge Undersee? Does she still live at the mayor's?"

He frowned. "Yes. She's married now - to Theoph. But they live in the mayor's house, yes."

"Theoph - I don't recall the name."

"He's … from the Capitol. He's like a Capitol representative; sort of over Cray and over the mayor. He doesn't really do anything. Just watches them."

"Why?"

"I don't think you understand - when people up and disappear from the district - even if later they turn up "dead" - people get involved. The Capitol found District 12 - lax. They sent us more Peacekeepers - and a supervisor to make sure Mayor Undersee and Cray actually enforced some rules."

"And Madge - married this man?"

"I don't know that she had a whole lot of say in the matter, to be honest."

Katniss gritted her teeth and her eyes flashed. "And now _you've_ gone missing."

"Yes." He shrugged. "It wouldn't have mattered if it was for a day or two. People wouldn't necessarily miss me right away. And I have an in with Cray. Now, though …."

"Not your family? Don't you still live at the bakery? Or ...?"

He laughed shortly. "No. No - and I don't see my family much. I'm a painter. You know it's - itinerant work. So, when I'm working, I'm not at home much, anyway. I'll be painting some of the government buildings - occasionally, someone's house. And when I'm not working, I'm holed up at home; I dont get many visitors."

"What's your in with Cray?"

He looked away from her. "I know some of his secrets."

He felt her watching him, waiting. "That sounds intriguing," she said, at last. "Secrets are useful."

He blinked, trying to look intriguing.

"What will happen to you when you get back?"

He shrugged. "The stocks for a couple of days. I've been there before."

"Have you?" she smiled, gently. "Now, that really sounds intriguing - unless it was for being drunk or something."

"No," he replied. "Once for refusing to pay a fine. The second time for interfering in an arrest." He yawned. "Anyway - it's a moot point. How long do you think I have? I'm so tired, Katniss."

"Stick with me a bit," she said. "You're not dying on my watch. Fair is fair, Peeta Mellark."

He abruptly fell asleep again, and his dreams were fever-tinted; bright orange in color, landscapes vast and empty. He walked over them with weary, aching feet, not knowing his destination - not seeing any landmarks, anyway.

When he woke again - just as abruptly - it was still daylight, though getting dim. He was covered in flowers - they were strewn across his chest, scattered all around him - and a strong, herbal scent filled his nostrils. She was sitting nearby, separating stalks of flowers and grass. "What?" he said.

"Meadowsweet, yarrow, peppermint," she said, in a soft tone, like an incantation. "And look -." she help up a yellow bunch. "I found your feverfew. I'm going to make you an herbal brew to try to bring down your fever."

"I had such exhausting dreams," he said.

"Do you know what I dreamed about - when I took my nap?"

"What's that?"

"That day," she said. "That day after you gave me the bread. I had almost forgotten the look on your face. Across the schoolyard. Like you wanted to tell me something, but just couldn't bring yourself to do it. It was the same with me."

"What did you want to tell me?"

"'Thank you,'" she said simply. "I should have thanked you. Like I said - it has weighed on me for all this time."

"I -."

She held up her hand. "I know what you're going to say, and I tell you again - it doesn't matter why. It just matters that you did." She stopped in her task and squinted her eyes, thoughtfully. "You know, I've never been in love, myself."

"You must love your sister," he said. "I assume that's why you left - to keep her from the Reaping. It must be rough - out there."

She lowered her eyes and made a mask of her face. "It's fairly lonely. And it was rougher for her - at first."

"Can she take care of herself - on her own?"

"She's not alone," said Katniss, almost defensively. Then she frowned at him. "That's more than enough information for you," she added.

He waited in silence while she stalked outside. After a few minutes, she returned with a cup of broth, and she knelt next to him again to help him drink. He barely tasted the liquid - but he could taste the scent of her - the smell of crushed grass and herbs on her fingers. The alpine flavor of her hair.

"You used to wrestle," she said, pushing his hair out of his eyes. "Right?"

"Back in high school, yeah," he replied, faintly surprised.

"You feel like - you're still quite strong."

By this he knew - somehow he knew - that she could feel his sapping energy and was covering up her concern. Yet - some long lost sense of pride flared up on this assertion - and on the understanding that she had even noticed this fact, let alone bothered to remember.

"Now," she said into his hair, "your medicine."

He shook his head. "No, Katniss."

"No? It won't taste too bad, I promise." She chuckled a little. "You raise a delicate girl in the woods - you learn to make bitter things sweet." She brought over another cup and again knelt down next to him and drew up his head.

"No," he said. "And it's not the taste. I'm sure it's fine. It's just prolonging the inevitable. I feel like - the longer we hold it off, the worse it's going to be, in the end."

"Nothing's inevitable," she said. "I need you to stop being so - so - so _District 12_ about this. There are always options."

He blinked up at her. "But what are mine?"

She bent down and pressed her lips against the top of his head. "To live. And - if you want it. If you really meant it. To go back with me, now."

He gulped hard at this and, when she put the cup back to his lips, accepted it - a lukewarm tea of a strong leafy flavor. It was bitter, yes, but a heavy infusion of peppermint helped it go down. He wasn't sure he trusted in this remedy, but unquestionably it tasted like medicine.

When he was finished, he smiled up at her and she grinned back at him through the frame of the shiny strands of black hair that were coming loose from her braid. "Is that a yes, then?" she asked.

"I can't promise to live," he answered. "But I'll do anything else you say for a kiss."

"You should have said so in the first place," she teased.

"I should have," he murmured. "You're right."

She bent down and kissed him again, this time on the brow. "Before you fall asleep," she told him, shifting herself and gently maneuvering his head off her lap, "let me tell you - not to be alarmed. We have some company."

He moved his mouth, but a heavy soporific feeling was moving up him. He felt numb and stupid, and could only stare at her. She whistled softly and a shadow shifted suddenly in the doorway. A lean, mangy dog padded softly into the room, then sat coolly in the doorway.

"This is Heba," said Katniss. "She hunts with me sometimes. She doesn't like to be indoors, but she'll watch out for you - at least keep the bears away. And keep you company."

"Whu ….?"

She stood up, grabbed her bow from the corner and shrugged it over her arm. "Just stay as quiet as you can. You talk in your sleep, but the drugs will hopefully keep you quiet. Yes, drugs, Peeta - my own concoction, some valerian, some hops." She smiled. "Don't worry - it's just a bit like drinking too much. Hopefully, I'll be back before they've even worn off."

"Back?" he whispered.

"There will be antibiotics in Twelve," she said briskly. "There will be some in store for the Peacekeepers, at the very least. And I know where to go to find them."

" _No!_ "

She smiled. "I knew you'd protest, and you're sweet to do it, Peeta Mellark. But time is running out - for both of us. Don't worry - I'll bring the feverfew to my mother."

 _No_. But he was slipping, and his voice no longer worked. The ceiling above him - dim in the dying light - tilted suddenly as her shadow flickered over it. He saw the silhouette of her bow move across the walls just as everything went dark.

* * *

Katniss paused outside the concrete cabin and took several steadying breaths. She stared at the lake, watching the sun dissolve into its glassy surface, blood red and liquid.

She listened anxiously for the sounds of his sleep - he breathed heavily, occasionally snored, as well as talked - but heard nothing. Anyway, unless things had dramatically changed, they were far enough away from Twelve that nobody should stray this far. The search for him - and he had left solid tracks all over the place around where he had been caught in the trap - would be in another sector, entirely. She had led him to the lake in roundabout ways and gone back twice to make sure their own tracks were covered.

Anyway, she needed to concern herself with _herself_ , now. It had been a pleasant distraction - to take care of this fair young man; strangely, one of the few people in Twelve for whom she had pleasant associations. She couldn't decide whether it was a good or an ill omen to have found him here, in the woods - delaying her mission, which was dangerous, anyway. And now leading her into even worse danger. She had no belief in fate - she had carved out every inch of her own life - but it seemed like chance had given her the opportunity to tie up some loose ends. It felt right.

And - she had so little variety in the company she kept nowadays. So few people around her she even liked all that much. Everyone was angry - filled with fire and fury. Homeless, resentful. They couldn't accept, like she had, life in the wild. They wanted to fight. They were ready to fight. They were restless and wearisome.

There was something peaceful about the young man - peaceful and pretty. Helpless - but not a whiner about it. And there was something in his look - some longing, some echo of this old affection that he claimed still in his face. She remembered that look (another person, a long time ago, and it wasn't welcome, then - though time had taught her to appreciate it, in retrospect), and knew that it could not be faked, just as it could not be hid. And - as had happened before, there was just something about Peeta Mellark's attention that made her feel as if - as if she was someone worth caring about. It was a good reminder.

As the last tip of the sun vanished beneath the horizon, Katniss sighed and set off for District Twelve.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter Four

* * *

"You know Orion always comes up sideways.

Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,

And rising on his hands, he looks in on me

Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something

I should have done by daylight, and indeed,

After the ground is frozen, I should have done

Before it froze"

-Robert Frost, The Star-Splitter

* * *

Gale Hawthorne approached his final year of school with the same sort of cool deliberation he brought to the rest of his life. A chapter in his life would soon be closing and some hard decisions had to be made.

 _"We can sneak out,"_ he whispered in her ear. _"After the commercial break."_

This was the first one. He twirled the long, dirty blonde hair in his fingers and felt, for the first time really, a twinge of regret. Normally - and he wasn't even sure how he did it, just that it came naturally - girls were so easy to snare, so easy to divest. He had no thought of getting close to them and definitely no desire for them to get close to him. (The fact that they did was their fault, really.)

This one was different, and not just because he had never in his life even came close to imagining that he would ever date a Merchant girl. Blonde and blue-eyed, a spray of freckles on her face: it was not even because she was actually quite pretty. Her parents were dead and she lived with the tanner and his family - distant and resentful relations. They were not kind to her and she seethed with a sort of repressed fury that almost intoxicated him. Certainly, he had been tempted to take things much further than were strictly cautious.

It was precisely because of this that he had to end things today.

They got up from their perch on the wooden crates sitting in the shade of the bakery. It was mandatory viewing for the third week in a row - these Games were stretching out way too long and the merchants and the miners were all restless with the lost time for working (time that would have to be made up for with double shifts in the fall). The audience was starting to get restless, too. No one who made it to the end of the Games was rootable, anyway, but this year's clearly-designated winner, an obnoxious Career from District 2, was almost unwatchable. He was dumb, arrogant, brutally strong and outrageously dull. Careers tended to spout the party line, but this one was in a league of his own: he literally dedicated his last two kills to President Snow, giving monotone speeches over the dead bodies so sycophantic even his own family must be cringing right now.

As Gale led the girl out of the town square and towards the Seam, he couldn't help himself but to vocally critique the Career's approach and also to point out how his assured win had been so carefully managed by the Gamemakers. She listened in silence while he described how the specific weaknesses of the rest of the Career pack had fed into his success against them … how some of the stronger non-Careers had been caught in Gamemaker traps, some of the weaker ones led into the Career paths.

He didn't mention his pet theory - that not only the Games, but the Reapings themselves, were rigged. Which is why he was fairly confident that he himself would never be Reaped. He was too strong, too well-fed, to represent District 12.

Once behind the slag heaps - comfortable in the thin grass, hidden behind the giant earth mounds, he watched her for awhile - her lashes lowered as she picked at her skirt - her mouth set in that perpetually aggrieved pout, and he nearly lost his nerve.

"Look -."

"Let me guess," she said abruptly. "We're done, right?"

"Well," he said, relief softening his voice, "school's about on, and you know that we don't exactly hang out with the same crowds."

"I don't hang out with crowds," she said.

But there was a flat affect to her voice. She wasn't arguing with him - just stating facts. He reminded himself that he was merely an act of rebellion on her part, and she pretty much the same on his.

Still - it was a pity. He liked a rebellious spirit.

After they kissed for awhile, they parted. He got up and was already eyeing the fence-line and the woods - he could use some alone time there. She was straightening out her skirt. Just before he turned to go, she said, "It's Katniss Everdeen, isn't it?"

He paused. This was a recurring problem. And it had been ever since he had started hanging out with the skinny kid in the woods, and it became generally - quietly - known that the two of them were hunting together. At first, when Katniss had been a seriously underdeveloped 12- and 13-year old, he had laughed at them for being jealous of a kid. And it had been true. In those first years after they met, she was not just scrawny but a real pain in the ass - surly, sarcastic, secretive. It had taken ages to wheedle a smile out of her; even longer to wheedle out her hunting tricks. Certainly, he had no thought of taking her behind any slag heaps. She was like a little sister to him. Better than that - she was excellent company, far too good to ruin with a romantic relationship. She was better than any other girl - better than any guy, for that matter. She was Katniss; unique - and uniquely _his_.

Of late, it had been less funny - not because Katniss was a serious contender for his trips to the slag heap, but because it was harder to argue the point. She was fifteen, now, and maybe she didn't conform to his particular type, but there was no arguing that she was every bit the young woman.

So, he didn't. He shrugged and said, "Sorry, Mels," and continued on his way.

He wanted to tell Katniss about this - on some Sunday, the day of their long hunt. How she was coming between him and his "love life." She'd laugh about it, he thought. But something always stopped him from doing it.

* * *

"This is new," Katniss said, slithering down the slope after him, sliding on the soft needles.

The clearing looked like it had been hit by a small bomb - a circle of trees fallen over in a clock-like pattern, their trunks radiating outward from the center. Whatever had happened to them had happened long ago. They were old, the bark crumbling away.

He eyed her slantedly as she stood next to him. Katniss was very observant in some ways - especially in the ways that mattered: the scents of the woods, the direction of the wind, the patterns of the rain. But in others, she was the exact opposite. If she hadn't noticed before now that he had been leading them a little further and further out on the hunt this fall … well, that was a little bit about her, a little bit about him, he supposed.

"These would make good dens for the winter," she added, looking around at the trees.

"A good place to revisit in a couple of months," he agreed quietly.

They sat down to their Sunday lunch - dried venison and sour apples - and were silent while they ate. After awhile, Katniss leaned back against one of the fallen trees and looked up at the hazy sky, and sighed.

"How's school going?" she asked him.

He shrugged. "I've been pulled twice for mining orientation, so far. So, that's been fun."

He watched her face tighten. Any mention of the mines brought on the past - the mining accident that had killed her father and his. He thought of all the arguments that they had had over the years - him exhorting her not to be sad, but mad - _angry_. Even when she was mad, she wasted it on amorphous things like fate, or helpless things like her mother. He couldn't quite get her to see that, like everything else, the Capitol's fingerprints were all over their fathers' deaths.

"It will be a drag," he said, still watching her. "Sundays will be my only days to hunt."

She frowned. "No more Reapings," she said.

"No - not for me. But …." He didn't have to elaborate. He had three younger siblings, and one of them would be eligible in two summers.

She put her hand on his for a second, and gave his fingers a quick, sympathetic squeeze. He'd miss her, he thought to himself. He _would_ miss her.

* * *

He'd definitely miss her. But his plans were already complicated enough. He had no intention of descending into the mines - to become a statistic for the Capitol. To live away from the sun, away from the _trees_. He had no intention of letting his younger siblings enter the Reaping. He had spent years living almost entirely on his own devices. The boys were getting old enough to help him take care of mom and Posy. They could do this.

Come the summer - they would go. They would do it during the Games, when everyone was distracted, when the mines were quiet and school was out. They would follow the landmarks he was carefully memorizing on each trip further and further out with Katniss. And they would get days on any hunt. _Days_. Even if they took to the air - called in hovercraft - used their heat sensors - they would be so far away by then, they would never be found.

* * *

And then something unexpected happened.

* * *

When he reviewed it afterward, sleepless (also so cold and a bit hungry - it was January, and the sparse haul this week had to go to fuel, new shoes for his rapidly-growing brother, some medicine for Posy, who had been sick all winter) - he wondered how he had let it sneak up on him.

 _Uniquely his._

It had drummed in his ears, his own words coming back to bite him. That morning, at the Hob, just a normal day - getting an early tasting of Greasy Sae's wild dog and wild herb stew … that Peacekeeper, Darius - Capitol-born, though that could be hard to remember sometimes - had flirted as outrageously with Katniss as he did with just about every girl in the Seam (he'd turn out just like Cray, thought Gale grumpily, if he wasn't there, already). _She's mine_ , thought Gale, before he could help it. And he'd had to resist a sudden urge to punch Darius to the ground.

From that moment, everything had to be rethought. Everything. He was running out of time, and suddenly there was an entirely new set of circumstances to be incorporated.

He had a year and a half before Rory entered the Reaping. That was his absolute deadline. He could do the mines for a while - if he had to. He thought he might need all that time to lay the groundwork - convince her to run off with him. Work in a plan to incorporate Prim and her mother (they would make a large and cumbersome caravan, which was the new wrinkle).

Then there was the coming Reaping. Gale still had no fears for himself - he knew, he knew, that he himself would not be Reaped. Strong, skilled - clear-eyed and eloquent, especially for a Seam kid … he had no contribution to make to the Capitol storyline about District 12. But Katniss had no similar obvious protections. She was far more skilled and deadly than they could possibly know, but by appearance she was only just marginally less weak and starving than your typical Seam girl. Would she be chosen? He doubted it - it was high time for a Merchant to go to the Games (it had been a while), and otherwise it would be someone small and weak. But he suddenly didn't feel like he could take the chance.

It was just hard to find the right approach. Katniss, it turned out, wasn't like the other girls in this way, either. Any efforts at charm - any random compliments he might sprinkle into the conversation … these went right over her head. She didn't even seem to realize that Darius had basically been trying to seduce her. He thought he might go a roundabout way and approach her mother first. Mrs. Everdeen might rationally decide to overlook her daughter's youth and innocence in service of a greater cause. A quick and symbolic toasting to add some legitimacy to the proceedings and he would escape District 12 with not only his family intact, but with a wife and a certain intriguing, if unsettling, future.

But he didn't quite trust Katniss' mother. She was Merchant - and she might have married into the Seam, but she didn't otherwise appear to be the rebellious sort. He didn't know how much of his mistrust came from Katniss herself, who spoke so dismissively of her own mother that he was sometimes startled by it. But, at any rate, it was too big of a risk to take. Katniss, he knew, would keep his secrets. But she was the only one he could trust.

As spring ambled toward summer, Gale's panic grew. By the time Katniss' sixteenth birthday rolled around, in early May, he had actually pondered knocking her over the head one day in the woods and absconding with her. He dreaded the coming Reaping with every fiber of his being.

* * *

Of all things, it was the wrestling tournament that year that brought the situation to a head. It started right after her birthday - a day they had spent in light hunting, heavy foraging and a long sit at their place in the woods, watching the evening fall on the valley. It's not that he hated the tournament. Afternoon classes were cancelled for the entire week and he usually got amusement out of thinking how much better he'd be than most of the pale, pasty wrestlers - if he'd bothered to do it. It's just that it was so tedious - yet another forced event for public consumption. Being obliged to pick a favorite and root him to the end.

For years this meant either picking a Mellark brother or watching one of the underdogs go down. The two older Mellarks had dominated the contest for the last few years. The second of the three - who was also in his last year of school - was probably the best of the bunch, but his younger brother was competing for the first time this year and everyone said that odds were that they would finish one-two this year. Boring.

He managed to slip away from his seat with the rest of his class and found a spot near Katniss. She was sitting next to the one person in school she ever hung out with, the Mayor's daughter, Madge Undersee - which made conversation difficult, at best. Madge greeted him with a wan smile, which she always did (they sometimes sold her strawberries or rabbit when her father wasn't available), and it, as usual, made him feel like she was secretly laughing at him.

When the crowd noise started gathering strength, he put his mouth in Katniss' hair. "We can sneak out of here between matches."

She nodded against his nose. But when the match ended and there was a movement and shuffle down on the gymnasium floor - and he made a motion to get up - Madge said something and pointed down at the athletes. This caught Katniss' attention and she kept her seat.

"Hold on a second," Katniss said, vaguely.

Gale frowned down at the floor. This was a strange discovery - did Katniss actually _like_ the wrestling? Or maybe, and this was an even stranger notion, she liked watching the boys? Or one in particular? He squinted at the boys taking the mat, now. One was the youngest of the Mellark brothers - the one new to the competition this year - and there was a bit of a buzz from the crowd. They would find out now if the last of the Mellarks lived up to the family tradition.

Gale sat morosely through the match, which went by quickly. Occasionally, Madge would whisper something to Katniss and Katniss would nod or whisper back. Perhaps one of the contestants was Madge's interest and not Katniss' … but even so.

Soon enough, they had slipped away, the school and the District behind them as they sauntered into the woods together. Gale's tension relaxed as the trees surrounded him. This was his place, his and hers. Uniquely theirs. They had bonded here and she was more comfortable and happy here with him than she was anywhere else - anywhere else. The wild was their natural home, and she surely knew this, at least subconsciously.

They reached their rock, their meeting place with the expansive view of the valley, but he went further in. Not as far as he had taken her lately, but a bit further north, where there was a small clearing that, at this time of year, was bursting with blue and golden wildflowers. It was not a good spot for stalking prey, so they rarely came here - only every once in awhile when they wanted to relax in the sun or gather wild lavender, or pick blackberries in the late summer.

Katniss - who was not one to waste even a truant afternoon - started immediately for the carpet of lavender. He followed her more slowly, watching her lithe figure in the mellow light of the afternoon sun, picking flowers. His heart squeezed and he realized in that moment just exactly how much he had fallen. Not just that he owned her, but that she had somehow come to own him in a way he had never thought would happen. He had not considered himself for the taking.

His thoughts were interrupted by a small cry on her part. She straightened up, something small and flat in her hand, which she held up to her eyes. Then she turned around and said to him, her face bright and curious, "Have you ever seen something like this before?"

He took it - it was a smooth wooden disk, thin and coin-sized, with a hole drilled into it, as if for stringing. Roughly notched into the disk was a carving of a bird, its wings unfurled.

He shook his head, but unsurely. "It looks vaguely familiar, but I don't think so."

"We should get some leather, make it into a bracelet for Posy," she said, smiling at him.

He nodded - but he was dazzled by her smile.

"I wonder how old it is," she added, looking around.

He looked down at it, hardly seeing it. Mention of Posy reminded him of one of his greatest fears - and the one argument he thought he might make to Katniss. Her own younger sister, Prim, would be in the Reaping this year, and - though the odds were slim, if randomness was what it was all about - he knew that this was adding another layer of anxiety to Katniss' daily life. Prim was the sort of person the Capitol would snatch from District 12 in a heartbeat. Poor and Seam, yes, but she looked almost exactly like her Merchant-born mother, and was fair and slight - unexpected. The Capitol could make quite a storyline out of her. And if that didn't happen ….

There were further indignities the poor young women of District 12 could suffer - and many of them did. It was probably not just Cray, though since he operated with impunity, he was the most open of the lot. Gale had seen Meliora slip out of his house, very early one morning when he was heading off to the woods. It had angered him at first, because, after all, she had been different from most Town girls - the resentment that fueled her so very sympathetic to his own. But he knew - she had few options. She was eighteen and, once she left school, where would she go? He had suspected the tanner had probably laid hands on her himself, and so she would need to escape, any way she could.

This was the fate that lay in Prim's path, if things went badly. What would she do if Katniss continued to forbid her from taking out tesserae, even when her own time to take tesserae ran out? Women seldom made it to full employment in the mines. There might be side work - there were the launderers, shift schedulers, sweepers. But that was likely that. Whether it was accurate or not (and Gale, acknowledging that Katniss' skills and strengths exceeded even his, in some areas, suspected not), the mines operated on the theory that efficiency was key and that women could not be efficient laborers, at least not as efficient as the men.

He put the disk in his pocket and returned his attention to Katniss, whose arms were now filled with flowers. The scent flooded his nostrils and he felt the animal urges of spring - they were not rough urges, but tender ones, though they were tinged again with jealousy. If other boys were starting to notice her, and she was starting to notice other boys, he really didn't have the time left that he had believed. Their alliance needed to be sealed - now. Or, as soon as possible, anyway.

He touched her shoulder and she started. "Katniss," he said, finally forcing the words out. "Katniss - I want to leave. Get out. Leave the District behind. Live in the woods. And I want you to come with me."


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five

* * *

O crossbow. I kneel. He oozes,  
and the grasses and red wasp

knock him back from my sight.  
The night braids my hair.

I do not dream. I do not glow.

"Self-Portrait as Artemis"

Tarfia Faizullah

* * *

The moon was thin, barely brighter than the night's brightest star, and when the harsh web of the fence suddenly appeared before her, Katniss was almost startled by it - it seemed closer than she remembered.

She zipped up her dark sweater and threw the hood over head. Paused to make sure she was breathing normally, low and steady, before continuing.

When your home is a prison, and your prison is home, there are certain mental exercises you must perform to make the separation. Katniss had divorced herself from her past as much as she was able: she thought about it as little as possible. It can be hard to forget when there are gaps - great big chunks of what makes you _you_ missing. But hardship - the daily fixation on survival - had papered over these gaps, to an extent.

So now - the odd sensation of needing to remember, of letting the old habits come back in. Particularly in light of Peeta's warning about a greater Capitol presence than previously. Yet, she knew one thing: if Peeta Mellark could slip out of District Twelve, she could slip in.

A quick check of her old ways in - hiding behind the tree that still grew tantalizingly close to the fence (she'd spent many a quiet hour sitting in it, listening for the soft buzz of the electricity to fade away) - confirmed that these were blocked off now. She made her way south, keeping the fence just in sight to her right side. Peeta had been in the marshy country south of the District - a place without good tree cover; although, if she had been hunting flowers, and she was unaware of the local geography, she might head that way too, most likely. But the most logical reason for him to do it was because that was the area best suited for escape from Twelve.

Because of its distance from the woods, she and Gale had never really explored that part of the fence. Not worth the energy. But it is true that that part of District Twelve was the least populated. The train tracks ran across the northern border of Twelve - the government buildings, the town square, the Town neighborhoods all clustered nearby. The Seam and the mines were in roughly the midsection of the district, along the east fence. The southernmost neighborhood was Victors' Village - the fence within the fence, the prison within the prison. There, in solitary confinement was - or had been (she should have confirmed this with Peeta, she thought to herself) - District Twelve's sole Hunger Games Victor, Haymitch Abernathy. Even so, Victors' Village was miles above the fence. Around it, Peacekeepers might patrol, occasionally, but there were no permanent dwellings - nothing to protect.

It took about an hour for her to get around to the south section of the fence and she was both keenly aware of the minutes ticking away and softly grateful for the delay. She found Peeta's trail (it was difficult to be sure in the darkness, but it did not seem to have expanded at all, as by a search party, which was curious) and followed it up out of the soft, muddy ground to the hard, sparse ground gently sloping upwards. She squinted for awhile at the fence - the loops of wire twisted together, silent in the silent air. Then she put her fingers through the loops, following the pattern up and down until the slightest hitch in the pattern - a slack feeling - alerted her to the place where the loops had been loosened - unhitched, then put roughly back together. Hard to see unless you were checking for it. And the District Twelve Peacekeepers had always put on an indifferent patrol.

She gently pulled at the fence until the gap was just large enough for her to slip through. Then she straightened and her chest tightened. She pushed the panic away and steadied herself.

The tangled empty spaces of this part of District Twelve made for lumpy and occasionally perilous walking. The ground was a dry bracken, littered with hidden branches, animal holes, the occasional rock. There was an odor on the wind - faint, but she was sensitive to scents and it soon started to bother her: the District waste dump was somewhere in the vicinity.

The first light from town came up earlier than she was expecting and she stopped short - it was the solitary glow of the one occupied house in Victors' Village, flickering palely.

She crept anxiously forward, touching the ground as lightly as possible. Her heart thumped in her ears. As she reached the iron fence of the Village, she hesitated. Then bore right, toward the mines and the Seam. She was no less likely to run into Peacekeepers there, but she was far less likely to cause an alarm among any random miners she might run into (though it would still be early in the night shift, so that was unlikely). She just needed to resist the temptation - for a while longer, a little while longer - to go directly to her childhood home and see her mother.

 _Things haven't changed much_ , she thought to herself, as she hastened up the road and then turned into the Meadow, all her memories of the place bursting to life as she went. Once in the Meadow, she could flit from bush to bush as she approached the town. And then from corner to corner of the houses surrounding the square. Here's where her luck started running out, as she had been about to sprint down an alley when they appeared - pale as ghosts in their white uniforms; a sight she had once dreaded - but back in those days, she had been young and overconfident - maybe a little arrogant about her ability to elude them. She missed that feeling now - she hadn't needed it in awhile. Caution can't always protect you. Hesitation can often betray you. Or at least make you lose your nerve.

She pressed against the wall of a house - felt the crumbling of the mortar between her fingers. She did know exactly how many seconds it took her to pull her bow and an arrow, and shoot. She could tell exactly how far away someone was by the echo of their footfall. So she counted ….

In the first couple of years after she left District Twelve, she did not actually live that far from home - she did not quite have the nerve. The lake house was a good place to shelter with Prim in those early days, and neither of them - despite all of her personal bravado and assurance - could make the break from Twelve.

And they had waited and waited - waited for Gale to change his mind, maybe even for their mother to change her mind. She had left messages - tokens in places that Gale was bound to find. She couldn't believe that his piqued feelings would actually take precedence over their friendship and his own plans.

But nothing had come of it, and her sense of caution had finally got the better of her. She was 18 and merely faced punishment. Prim now faced punishment as well as the Reaping. There could be no mistakes, no carelessness. Finally, after much debate - so much scouting and prepping, tears and second-guessing… they had walked away. Walked north, following, as far as Katniss knew, the only lead she had ever had that there would be something else, someone else, out there - the runaways she and Gale had once encountered at the fateful end of their journey - on their way somewhere beyond Twelve.

…. As the footsteps faded, Katniss slowly let out her breath. She shook her head, steeled herself, and continued on, down the alley, then another. A shortcut through a backyard led to an open field - the end of the railroad tracks rising in the darkness. From here she could still - as she had once before - slip between abandoned trucks and overturned dumpsters and a burned-out rail car to approach the Mayor's house from the back.

Despite the fact that it had been generally known among the District that she and Gale were trading ill-gotten-goods with everyone in town, they had always done it this way - the back alley behind the Peacekeeper barracks; the backs of the shops, the back doors of official houses. They had avoided the arrogance of slipping in to open trading; even at the Hob, there had been coded words and trades made in darkened corners.

Katniss had even come this way on legitimate business to the mayor's house. It's not like they had been friends, exactly - but Madge had been her quiet companion for years at school and every long once in a while, Katniss had had cause to call on her at home. A joint project. A borrowed book. Over one stretch of time, when they were in sixth grade, Katniss had made daily trips to the house to deliver homework over Madge's long illness. Once, Katniss had accompanied her mother when Madge's mother had a miscarriage. It was a long time ago - probably more than fifteen years. But she remembered her parents' conversation that night.

 _"The mayor has real medication. Real stuff. Capitol grade medicines."_

 _"Probably stored there for the Peacekeepers. There would be a black market like you wouldn't believe if they kept them at the barracks."_

A whisper of that fire - that sense of impotence and rage she had felt, if only in its nascent form - came back to her as she heard their voices in her head. She hardened herself and let her anger take her over the threshold.

The back door was locked, but the window next to it open to the warm spring night. Katniss pushed through the screen and climbed through. She found herself in the dining room, closed her eyes for a second to remind herself of the layout of the house, then crept out, down the end of a hall to where she remembered the supply closet to be.

This, of course, was locked, but her skinning knife dispatched this barrier quickly enough.

It was this final part that would be the problem. She closed the closet door, pulled out a tiny flashlight - her anxiety at the usage of the precious batteries more keen than any fear of discovery - and looked around. There were still boxes of medicines here. Not as many as she remembered - or imagined. Perhaps even the mayor's family was kept in limited supply, now - or perhaps her memory failed her.

At any rate - the boxes gave no hint of actual use. There were strings of letters that made no sense to her: quadrocycline, metathoxine, spironolactone, meperedine. And she couldn't stop to make any educated guesses - she just started opening boxes, taking a vial or tube from each, and stuffing them in her jacket. At the very least - if she had nothing to cure him, there was undoubtedly something in this lot that would help ease his passing.

Back out in the dark hallway, her senses tingled. There was something different in the air. Some ripple of change. She heard a creak above her head - the upstairs floor, disturbed by some footfall. Or was it just a settling in the …?

No - definitely footsteps. She crept along the hallway, and as she did - despite the fact that she was so quiet she couldn't even hear herself - the footsteps above her quickened their pace. She raced off, abandoning stealth. Back door. Back fields. Back alley. An alarm started to sound as she reached the houses at the edge of the town square. She bore west - lest she run straight into the barracks. This was in the opposite direction of the Seam, so through neighborhoods less familiar. She ran into a trash can and it spun away from her, clattering to the ground, spilling its contents. Lights came up and she increased her pace.

 _I won't make it all the way back to the fence_ , she thought, trying not to panic.

Then the iron bars of the Victors' Village gate rose up in front of her, simultaneously with the sound of distant shouts from rousing Peacekeepers. She pulled up - took some deep breaths - hesitated on the decision.

Another unfamiliar neighborhood, Victors' Village. The solid stone houses, all identical, organized in a block around a neat and tidy green. They could have represented all matter of resentment - opulence in the middle of poverty. Capitol waste - thoughtless, arrogant. But Haymitch, the lone resident of the village, had always been so pitiable. _No one is rootable who wins the Games._ But the toll it had taken on him had been so obviously high.

It had been a visit she had planned to make anyway.

She ran in through the gates (no rear escape, probably, she thought grimly) - and made for the third house on the right. She sprinted up the porch and turned the doorknob. The suddenness of the bright electric light made her blink for a moment, and she was almost too late to dodge the knife that came hurtling toward her. It had been weakly tossed, anyway; it landed, flatly, at her feet.

She looked up. His face - mouth gaping open, dark-encircled eyes wide in the light - was possibly a mirror of her own. She reached behind her and he jumped.

"Wait!" she commanded, arresting his movement. She held out a flat wooden disk, small as a coin, and approached him cautiously. "I've been told this means something to you," she added, thumbing the carving of the bird on the token.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

* * *

 _Let them have it, the noons and rain and joy._

 _He makes a world here out of frog songs_

 _and packed earth._

Hephaestus Alone

\- Linda Gregg

* * *

Katniss gripped the handrail tightly as she walked blindly and cautiously down a dark staircase, until Haymitch switched on a light and the shadows retreated into the corners of the basement. It was a dark, unfinished room, with exposed struts, corners strung over with cobwebs. A few boxes and crates on the concrete floor - that was it. He gestured to her to sit down on one, and she did so, finally letting out a breath of relief. It might be only for a moment, but she could relax.

He sat down on the floor in front of her, cross-legged, watching her closely while she pulled out bottles and tubes from her jacket and lined them up on the box next to her. Now that surprise and fear had receded, he had a wry - almost sarcastic - look to his face, as if runaways came bursting into his house in the middle of any given night, and it was boring to him by now.

She wondered if he remembered her at all. He had been hard not to notice - loud and sometimes obnoxious, sometimes drunk, when he had come to the Hob to buy spirits. The older folk - the ones who had known him when he had been Reaped for the Games - had tolerated and even welcomed him (he brought that rarest of things to the Hob - actual cash). But she and Gale had given him a wide berth. Cash they could use, but was not worth the trouble - it was traceable, much more so than traded goods. And he was too close to the Capitol. He traveled there once a year and - as unkempt and bitter as he might appear in Twelve, for the Capitol televisions, he cleaned up, fell in line, gave his interviews, mentored his tributes. He would be filmed - especially once his tributes died, inevitably and usually early enough in the Games - drinking it up, living it up, with his friends in the Capitol. Perhaps it had all been an act. But it had been a good one.

He grabbed one of her bottles and studied the label. He seemed to have a hard time deciphering the lettering, as he moved it back and forth in front of his face, squinting. "Next time," he said finally, "bring me some of the Mayor's stash of whiskey. This stuff isn't my thing."

She decided to take it as a joke, and forced a laugh. "Noted," she said.

He shook his head. "So, this is the cause for all the uproar in town," he said. "A handful of stolen drugs. Worth the crackdown, you think?"

She shrugged.

"No, I should have figured. You didn't think about that when you left in the first place, either, did you?"

"So, you know who I am."

He snorted. "You haven't changed all that much."

She looked up into his lined face, paler than it used to be under steel-gray hair. "You neither," she lied. "So, what does that mean these days - 'the crackdown?'"

"Peacekeepers will raid the Seam, maybe some of the shadier Townies - they'll discover some minor contraband. It will mean jail, the stocks. The usual."

"It wasn't my intent," she told him. "But I was desperate."

"We're all fucking desperate," he responded.

She opened her mouth to argue, but the knock on his door stayed her. She stood, automatically pulled her bow. He got to his feet much more slowly and with a look of deep resignation. "Here we go," he said. "Stay put and stay still. Turn out the light. If you hear me say ... 'mockingjay' - that will mean they are conducting a search. But I doubt they will."

She sat in the darkness, straining to hear, but all the voices were muffled. She could hear Haymitch's rise and fall, but no words were clear. But - and this was strange - she felt eerily confident in his ability to turn away Peacekeepers. They had always left him alone. That probably hadn't changed, even under a new regime. Victors were a protected class. And Haymitch was Twelve's only one.

Finally, she heard his front door close and then the basement door opened. "Just me," he said.

When the light was back on, he sat down on a crate and laughed to himself, long and softly. She just watched him, waiting, and after awhile, he calmed down and grinned at her. "You've drawn out Theoph himself. So, I got to remind him, right in front of Cray, what drug-addicted thieves permeate the Peacekeeper ranks. Half of them are here just to avoid detox and detention in the Capitol. 'Look to your own ranks,' I told him. Oh," he added, seeing her expression, "they will still use this as a reason to scour the Seam for contraband. That can't be avoided. But Cray has so many skeletons in his closet, he'll keep the uproar to a minimum, if he can."

This reminded her of Peeta and she frowned, impatient now. "How hard will it be for me to -?"

"Escape again? Impossible, for the next two days, at least. The fence will be charged. Patrols doubled. They might actually turn their cameras on …"

"No," said Katniss. "I need to get out tomorrow - or later today, I mean," she said.

"What's the rush, sweetheart? You just got here, didn't you? Don't you want to take in the sights?"

His sarcasm was starting to get on her nerves. "I need to get these drugs to someone."

"Your black market transactions will have to wait."

So, she explained. It was almost satisfying to watch the wry look disappear from his face, replaced by a smeared look of surprise.

"Peeta - Mellark?" He shook his head. "One of the baker's family, I presume? What in the devil is he doing outside the fence?"

"Picking flowers. You mean to say - no one has noticed him missing?"

"I haven't heard anything about it."

"Well - he's dying. If not dead already."

"These certainly ought to finish him off."

She didn't rise to his bait. "I'll have to see Cray."

"Are you _crazy_? We can get you out of the district. We can probably do it the way you came in. But - and I'm sorry for the kid, I truly am - but he's not worth giving yourself up."

"Peeta says he has something on Cray - he knows his secrets. I'm guessing that's why there's been no search, so far."

"If he has something on Cray, Cray's going to be in no hurry to save his life."

Katniss clamped her mouth down on a retort.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," he said. "Maybe the kid can hang on a couple of days." He squinted at her for a long time and she suppressed a yawn. "So - what is your business here, anyway? Why come back, Miss Mockingjay?"

"I had three people to see," she replied, coolly. "You. Madge Undersee. My mother."

He blinked at her. "Who specifically sent you?"

"No names," she said. "But someone you know - from the Capitol. Someone you think is dead."

His eyes seemed to flicker. "That could be any number of people. You must be running quite an afterlife there - in …."

"Thirteen."

He shrugged. This did not seem to be news to him. She had not been told what specifically he knew - the people who fled the Capitol were secretive to a fault, as if they could be tortured for information at any time. All she knew was that Haymitch was part of "the Underground," the "Plutarch" network. And that he needed to know that time was running out.

"Not strictly _in_ Thirteen - not yet. Most of the refugees left their homes, _hoping_ to find it intact, but afraid of venturing too close to what could be radioactive ruins. I knew nothing about this idea - that Thirteen had actually survived the Dark Days. I just ran into some people who did and we set up camp, a community, in the intact buildings on the edges of Thirteen. Then some of us ventured further in - and further. We found Thirteen - not intact, exactly, but -."

"Not glowing in the dark, either. Yeah, yeah. I know. You can shortcut that bit. Thirteen pretended to get itself destroyed in order to end the war without deploying nukes, then went underground."

"We made contact. We're preparing to move into Thirteen." At this she blinked and looked slightly away from him. Moving to Thirteen - she had, at least for herself, not really made up her mind to it. But this was not information Haymitch needed. "And Thirteen is preparing for war. Preparing to reignite the rebellion. Is it true - that Snow is on death's door?"

He bit his lip. "It's a rumor," he replied. "But I trust the source. They'll find it hard. Snow's death alone isn't enough. Oh, there will be some unrest. But the districts need a spark - something to rally around - something to ignite them. Only an inferno will do, at this point."

"I don't disagree, but that's not my business. I just needed to get you the warning. You and Madge. And get my mother out."

"Madge, huh?"

Katniss raised her eyebrows. "Yes - apparently her family is in the 'know.' I didn't know about her husband, though."

"Yes, that was an unfortunate intrusion," Haymitch replied vaguely.

* * *

Katniss took a nap, curled up on top of the crate. She had one of her recurring dreams. It started with a memory - a day, not long after she fled Twelve, when she was hunting in the woods. They had held tight for the first couple of weeks, sheltered in the little house by the lake. Katniss had ducked out to collect berries and catch fish. But an anxious and unsettled feeling had come over her, and she had needed to sate her restlessness with a hunt. She came up to a circular clearing in the woods. The trees were knocked over in an unsettling pattern, as if blasted backwards. Like wheel spokes, or a clock, they formed a nearly-perfect circle.

As she had in real life, she lifted her bow at the sight of a dark figure. Easy prey, a fat summer deer. But when she shot the deer it both fell to the ground and sprung away, as if both captured and escaped at the same time. As it ran away from her, she turned as if to follow, but dread overwhelmed her, rooting her to the spot. There was a smell in the air. Baking bread.

She woke up hungry, stomach rumbling. She sniffed the darkness experimentally, hoping the bread smell was not just a dream. Then she sat bolt upright, wondering how long she had slept.

She crept up the stairs, listening carefully. She opened the door - the basement door opened onto the back of a pantry and she stared hungrily at all the cans of meat and vegetables. At this point, it didn't matter how far it was from fresh. She hesitated - her younger self would have grabbed a can without compunction, knowing well that Haymitch was wealthy enough not to miss some potted meat. But it was starting to get to her - Haymitch's somewhat resentful greeting of her, which, on top of Peeta's (to a certain extent) was starting to make her feel like a ghost with no right to exist. As if by saving her sister's life, she had forfeited her claims to Twelve. Even to its food. Anyway, she was no longer a starving kid, hunting, digging, trading, _sweating_ over every meal. Life wasn't easy - it wasn't like this, all served up in cylinders, ready-made. But it had a dignity to it.

She went out to the kitchen, rumbling stomach debating her decision all the way. The house was silent - the lights filtering through the curtains was silvery, just pre-dawn. She hadn't slept long.

He wasn't anywhere in the bottom floor of the house, and she eyed the staircase, really not liking the idea of rooting him up from his bed. She went instead to the front room and peered very cautiously between the curtains at the damp morning. She eyed the ironwork of the Victors' Village fence. More difficult to scale than the chain link fence that encircled the district, even if it was not electrified. But the gates faced town, and she had no intention of going that way, so scale the fence she ….

Her heart thudded in her chest as two figures suddenly appeared on the village green. They were walking urgently toward her - Haymitch and her mother.

"You just can't stay in place, can you, girl?" Haymitch said sourly, as he came in the front door.

Katniss gaped at her mother, who returned the favor. Fair and slight, pale and blue-eyed, there were lines drawing in her face, even deeper than before - giving her a haggard look that reminded Katniss of the very worst of the time after her father's death. It was impossible to hold back the old feelings - the resentment and bitterness. The sense of abandonment. Prim had been too young; or perhaps it was just that she was made differently: to this day, she still fretted and worried about this woman as if she hadn't let them almost starve to death.

"Katniss," she said.

With an effort, Katniss threw off the memories and stepped forward to pull her mother into a hug. She felt so much smaller than she remembered.

"Back in the basement," growled Haymitch, peering out the window.

"Is someone coming?" she gasped.

"No, but when they do, we want to be prepared."

Katniss returned underground reluctantly; she was already starting to loathe the dark, damp, close space and the musty smell of it.

They sat opposite each other, much as she and Haymitch had last night, and Katniss felt vaguely the same - vaguely defensive, vaguely guilty. But her mother's face was not accusatory. Her eyes were wet and, as they spoke, softly and urgently, her face slowly eased into a smile.

"Prim?"

"Is well. She misses you - terribly."

"So many times, I've wished …. But it was worth it, then - it was _worth_ it. Everything."

Katniss breathed out her relief. "She wants to see you. But even if you don't come back with me, I'm to give you all of her love."

Her mother didn't answer the implied question, just sighed and closed her eyes. "It was so difficult - never having word of you. But I knew - I knew - I just knew you would keep her alive. You're like your father. There was nothing he couldn't do if he set his mind to it."

Katniss was disarmed by the compliment, but her attention was caught by something else. "Never had word? I left word for you. For the first two years. I hoped that Gale would have found my notes and delivered them to you."

"Gale?" Her mother frowned now, looking up in confusion. "Didn't he go with you, after all?"

"No," said Katniss in surprise. "No. I haven't seen him - since we left. So - he's not here?"

" _I_ haven't seen him since you left - or, no, shortly after that, I guess. And Hazelle - well, at least, if she's heard from him herself, she's never said."

"He left his family behind?" Katniss stood up abruptly and paced from one end of the room and back. "After all his planning - after everything he said? Or did they refuse to go - like you did?"

Her mother shrugged, and Katniss sat down again, left to ponder the strangeness of this news. She had entered Twelve still undecided about seeing him again. There had been bitterness in their parting, and she also couldn't trust that he wouldn't greet her news with noise and ruckus. She had planned to leave behind word, so she could be safely on her way back to Thirteen before he was roused to action. But all her plans kept falling apart.

Where was he? Out there - alone - in the wilderness? Had he survived? (Difficult to imagine him not surviving.) Had he also met with refugees?

"Well, that's news - and puzzling to say the least," she finally said. "But I've no time for it. Firstly, I need you to say you'll come back with me. We're actually just a few days' journey from here - up near Thirteen. There are a community of almost twenty of us, from almost all the districts, a few from the Capitol. It's safe there - safer than here … rebellion's starting, and Twelve won't be safe."

Her mother swallowed. "Not again," she said.

"About time," Katniss answered her, firmly.

"But what about everyone else - here in Twelve?"

Katniss suppressed a groan. Ideally, of course, she would lead a mass exodus through the woods to Thirteen. But surely her mother could see that it was an impossibility. She'd have to spend months spreading quiet word about the district - there would be snitches; the Peacekeepers and their guns would suppress any hint of a flight. Haymitch would have to work on it. Madge would have to work on it. This was not her task - could not be her task.

Anyway, Twelve had never cared for her. Had not lifted a finger to feed her in her direst time. Gale had cared - though their friendship had to some extent been based on mutual survival. Peeta … Peeta had cared. That was it.

"Haymitch is a contact for the rebellion and I've let him know," she replied shortly. "Prim would kill me if I didn't come back with you."

"I'll come. Of course, I'll come."

"Good - escape will be difficult, Haymitch says, for a couple of days. But we'll manage it. However, I have one thing I have to do first." She reached into her jacket to pull out the wilting flowers. "I ran into someone in the woods."

"Feverfew … Peeta!" her mother grabbed the flowers. "We have been so worried - worried that he got himself hurt, or lost - or captured. Keeping people from his house …."

"Yes - how have you managed it? Haymitch seems to think that no one's noticed he's missing."

"Cray's been keeping it quiet, and for everyone else - we've just been telling them that he can have no visitors while he is taking care of his wife."


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter Seven

* * *

 _See, this dude was a hunter. A good one, too. Probably revered Artemis as much as the next hunter. Maybe more ..._ _ _but poor Actaeon had been born without these essential instincts, and now that they were needed he was left high and dry.__

The Death of Actaeon. Unknown.

* * *

"Gale says it's the only way to truly stay safe. Him and his family. Me and mine."

Katniss watched the doubt flicker across her mother's face. They sat across the table from each other, in the corner of the main room of their house - it was dim and slightly dusty (always in the Seam there was dust) - but Katniss' mother kept her eyes down.

"Not truly safe," she replied, as if talking to the wood grain. "Not with wild animals, Peacekeepers, old traps left behind from the Dark Days."

"No - there are no guarantees," Katniss replied. "But Gale and I can fend off animals, avoid traps, hide from Peacekeepers."

"Where would we go?"

Katniss paused. She had never told her mother about the redheaded girl and boy she had watched being captured, and she wasn't about to start now. "Follow the woods - probably. North … northeast."

Her mother swallowed visibly, then stood up from the table and walked over to the window. "It's something your father spoke of - I will admit it. Though - I was never sure how serious he was. I don't think he could physically have seen you in the Reaping."

"And that's how I feel about Prim. Don't you, Mom?"

Her mother was silent for a long time. "What is Gale's plan, exactly? Does he really mean for eight people to walk out of the District all at once, without detection?"

Katniss smiled, relaxed a little. She had oversold her own confidence in the plan; now her mother's apparent capitulation seemed like a good omen. She was happy that she didn't have to use the same arguments Gale had - the near certainty that Prim would either need to take out tesserae or feel pressured into joining the line outside Cray's house - or at the very least into an early marriage. Katniss wished she could be angry at Gale for even suggesting these things - _she_ could keep the family fed, _she_ could keep Prim safe … yet, she had to be realistic. "Prim and I would go first - I'm known to leave the fence, and I've taken her with me once or twice. Once we are believed to have 'vanished' - and the Peacekeepers start combing the wrong side of the district, Gale would send Rory and Vick out as volunteers to help the search, then come back for you and Hazelle and Posy. This would take place at the end of the school year - stretching out into the Reaping and the Games, so everyone will be at their most distracted."

Her mother turned to her and now did look into her eyes, with a brittle smile. "That sounds complicated."

Katniss licked her lips. "It's as simple as we can make it. Anyway, what choice do we have?"

"We can reduce the numbers - at least by one."

"You mean … you would stay behind?"

Her mother nodded.

"You can't - you'd be punished."

"Perhaps. But - if I came with you, I'd be a drag on the party. I'd put you in too much jeopardy. Honey - wait. You know this. You know this. I'm not strong like you - and I'm far too old not to be frightened of the things I've always been taught to fear. And I've seen it - so much death. The only salvation in my life since your father's death is you girls, and the knowledge that I can relieve some of the suffering around me. Here."

Katniss suppressed a retort. What she said would be cruel - and it would be a half-truth, anyway. If she was scared - and she was - her mother would be terrified outside the fence; and not everyone can face their terror. Disappointing - but true. She said: "Some things are worth chancing. Anyway, Prim would never go if she thought you'd be punished. She might not go at all, if you don't."

"Perhaps I would join you - eventually. At least, that she can be told. And - and - if people thought that you'd gone out and been killed, not run off ... well - maybe it wouldn't actually come back on me, at all."

* * *

Gale said: "We're running out of time to adjust plans."

Katniss got up from their rock and paced around a little, eventually snaking her arm around a young fir tree and pressing her cheek against it. "I know - but hear me out. It would be easy to do. A couple of old dresses - some deer blood, or something … leave them in the west side of the fence, then flee east. Everyone would think we had been attacked by a bear or a mutt or something. Sad - but our just desserts. We'd go to the lake I was telling you about and wait for you and your family: you could sneak them out just as you intended - you could wait for the Games to start, slip out in the distraction. By then, no one would even associate you running off with me disappearing."

Gale balanced his weight on his palms and rocked back and forth for a few minutes. In truth, he was a bit angry with himself that this plan hadn't occurred to him in the first place - and astounded that Mrs. Everdeen had thought of it first. And he was anxious - so much could go wrong in the separation.

But … she looked so endearing, blinking at him from the tree. Something innocent about her, as always, but blended with her earthy perilousness that belied her years - and her lack of experience. He sighed. "You're sure that Prim will agree to this - if your mother doesn't come with us?"

"Between us, we'll make her," said Katniss, firmly. She glanced upward at the sky - the position of the sun. They were running out of time. Always, time was running short. It wouldn't be that way much longer.

He stood up and joined her. Almost thoughtlessly, he put his hand over hers and pressed it, gently, against the tree.

She looked down at his hand - sensing, at last, the difference. He had understood this for a long time - the different levels of intimacy that could be conveyed by a simple touch. It was very different from the intimacy of the hunt, their bodies pressed together, at one with each other - protection, efficiency. This was tenderness. This was affection. And it was possession.

"Gale," she said.

"Catnip." He licked his lips. "Please don't pretend that you don't know."

Her quick eyes darted up to meet his. This startled him. They rarely looked straight at him in these moments - it was always heads down, lips pursed; the act of submission. It's how the game is _played_. He didn't mean anything by it and they didn't mean anything by it - it was the pageant of the hunt. Katniss, of course, would be different.

He withdrew his hand, resentfully. "I thought you knew."

"I never said anything - did I?" she asked, sounding genuinely puzzled.

Stung, he replied with bitterness in his voice that he did not intend. "We go everywhere together. We do everything."

She slid herself around the tree so that she could face him, and so that the trunk of the tree stood between then. _Not everywhere_ , her expression said. _Not everything_. "Gale - don't take it wrong. You - you startled me, is all. I've just never thought of you - of us - in that way."

"What's wrong with you?" he asked her. "I'm a grown man - you're a woman. What do you think everyone thinks?"

"Do I care what everyone thinks?" she retorted - yet she blushed.

"No," he shook his head, then abruptly smiled and reached out to touch her - gently - on her face. Her look was stony - before, during, after the gesture.

"It's what you think that matters right now," she told him. "Plain and simple."

"I think I love you, isn't that plain enough?"

She recoiled. "Gale, I … you know I care about you. I don't know exactly what I would do without you. But …."

"That's how it starts," he said earnestly.

"But who knows how it ends?" She frowned at him. Her eyes widened as it finally occurred to her - his sudden, urgent decision to include her in his plans. It hadn't been her he had wanted - his friend, his companion in the hunt. It had been this imaginary version of herself - _of him_ , not with him. Belonging to him and not for her arrows, but for ….

He took her hand off the tree - she was still clutching it, almost hugging it now - and kissed the back of it. A vague and unpleasant sensation crawled up her spine. It was not an unpleasant kiss. It just felt - strange and wrong, alien and intrusive. And, in the circumstances, vaguely sinister.

"You know how it ends," he said.

As if there was something inevitable about it. Unavoidable. Katniss couldn't help herself and she laughed. "Do you use those words on other girls?" she asked him.

He dropped her hand. "What?"

"It suddenly sounds like you're not talking to me, but to just anyone with more hormones than sense."

"I'm being honest with you here," he said. "What is wrong with you?"

"What is wrong with _me_? We're about to make this huge, life-changing decision, risking our lives and our families' lives, and you're suddenly making it about - something else."

"Can't you even say it? Love - sex. Family. You and me, Katniss - like before but - better. Always."

"Always?"

"Can you honestly imagine it any other way? And anyway, let's be realistic - who else do you plan to meet out there in the woods? When you agreed to this plan, I naturally thought you had taken that into account - and that you understood that it would be - you and me."

She stared at him. She was more disappointed than angry. She recognized his tactics; she had felt them used on her before; school was like this, for one thing - all his cloud of arguments leading to one conclusion, as if there were no others, as if there was no choice. It was the thing that she couldn't tolerate about living in District Twelve in the first place - the penned-in sensation, the restriction of place, of poverty, of expectation. One's life, whether one actually was Reaped or not, was a tribute to the Capitol.

To hear Gale try the same tactics on her was profoundly unbearable. "I don't want love. Not that kind of love. I don't want to have children."

"Why not? I mean - if we were free, free from the Reaping. Why not?"

"Why not raise homeless, stateless children in poverty and danger? I think that question answers itself." She held up her hand to stop him as he opened his mouth. Right now, all she wanted to do was wipe the angry lines from around his eyes and get the hell out of this conversation. "I know what you're going to say. I know what you think. But this is no way to begin, Gale. You - you startled me and I'm sorry I couldn't give you the reaction that you wanted. It just feels - almost like you lied to me. All this time you spent with me, assuming and not speaking. Why you made these plans with me. Maybe I misunderstand you - but if I said 'no' right now - 'no' to ever being your - your lover …"

"My wife."

"Or especially 'no' to _that_. Would you still want me to come with you?"

After some hesitation, he said, "Yes." But it was his pause that gave her his true answer.

"Because you think that, over time, it will happen eventually. Or that you will persuade me. Wear me down."

Gale snorted. "You're impossible."

She smiled thinly. "We should go -."

"Is it another boy?"

" _What_?"

"Because if you leave - you leave that behind. Forever."

And at this - finally this - he had crossed her last line. "And I'm the one who's impossible? Damn it, Gale - do you think this is some kind of game or something? If so, count me out of your plans - I'll do it without you."

She stormed off without waiting for his reply. He remained behind - his self-critical mind already parsing out everything that he had done wrong in the conversation - his bruised ego trying desperately to defend itself. What _was_ wrong with him? It's as if the thing that had always come easy to him before would not come to him at all, now. _Now_ \- when it mattered. And he didn't know how to fix it.

* * *

Katniss had never understood before the expression "seeing red." But now it was as if there was a film the color of anger over her eyes. As she clambered through the fence and crossed the back of the Meadow on her way to the Seam, everything looked slightly darker, slightly more crooked.

She hesitated outside her house. In her present mood, it would be too confining, and she would be too unpleasant. She thought vaguely of going to the Hob, but shied away from the associations. She walked instead into town, threaded through the back alleys and found herself at the train tracks just as a whistle announced the arrival of the afternoon train.

She continued toward Madge's house - why, she wasn't sure; maybe just that she needed to tell her story to another girl ( _how do so without revealing too much?_ ) and have it confirmed that she wasn't crazy. Because - the feeling was creeping up on her that she had somehow been in the wrong. Certainly, that she could have handled it better. ( _But how? How manufacture something that didn't exist? And on demand?_ She still couldn't believe he had asked it of her. And then made her feel bad about it.)

She walked past the mayor's house, walked on, approached the train station - watched the people (mostly shopkeepers) gather together. They laughed and joked together - life was so much simpler for them, she thought.

She passed one of the old storage buildings - her reflection followed her from pane to pane of its greased windows. She stopped to glimpse herself - to squint at the image, to see if she could determine the change in herself that had sparked the change in Gale. She was surprised to see nothing of the anger in her face. Her face was its usual mask - mouth in a line, eyes giving away nothing. Had emotion, she wondered, been worked out of her, bit by bit - after all these years of masking anger with silence, pain with silence? All these years of hunting, of shutting out fear and comfort in service of hunger.

 _Hunger_ , she thought. I've sacrificed my life to it. Somehow, Gale has kept himself open - his heart and his life open - and I am closed.

She looked down at the crumpled shadow at her feet. Then up as the dust around the tracks billowed around the wheels of the train as it hissed its way into the station. Boxes and bags were unloaded - the Capitol workers on some kind of tight schedule, apparently, as items for the town were flung at the merchants haphazardly. Katniss watched as Peeta Mellark caught an enormous sack of flour out of the air as if it weighed nothing. She got a brief glimpse of his face as he turned around, hitching the sack over his shoulder. He was neither smiling nor frowning, but there was a handsome look of bemusement - of content - on it.

It was a pity that it was far too late to give him the thanks that she owed him. Did he even remember it? A loaf of bread on a rainy day? _The bruise._ He probably remembered the punishment he had taken. She had never seen his face like that before or after (and she had looked for it occasionally, as one does), so it seemed to be an isolated incident. Perhaps a memorable one.

But - anyway - what of it? It was too late. It would now always be too late. And he looked - fine. Life for him would be fine. He could be left behind, even with this thing unfinished between them, and it would be fine.

* * *

Katniss put her hands in her pocket and fingered the little wooden mockingjay token while she watched her mother struggle with Haymitch's stove. She had a pot of water boiling on one burner - some lumpy meat substance frying on another.

"It's like old times," she said. "Watching you infuse herbs. Is that for ... does - does - she have migraines?"

"Melly?" was the reply. "No. No. She has a brain tumor. We can't get enough morphling to her to deal with the pain. Not that this will help all that much, but it will ease her, some - and anyway, Peeta wanted to feel useful. I'm just sorry that he was injured."

As if on cue, Haymitch came into the kitchen from a side room. He put one of the vials she had taken in front of her, along with a needle. "This one," he said. "This is the antibiotic," he added impatiently at her befuddled expression.

She jumped up. "Haymitch!"

"Eat first, Katniss," said her mother. "After you eat, you'll come with me to Peeta's - from there to the fence."

"But …."

"I spoke to Cray," Haymitch growled. "He's cutting the cameras and the power in an hour. Five minute window. That's it."

"How did you -? I don't understand -."

He shrugged. "I made an educated guess about what Peeta has on him." He narrowed his eyes at her. "You turning up alive was clue number one," he added mysteriously.

"What the hell do you mean?"

"Not my secret to spill, sweetheart."

"Cray isn't going to be there, is he?" asked her mother.

"At Peeta's?" asked Haymitch. "Why would he?"

"He often is."

"Or - she at his place, is that what you mean?" Haymitch spat suddenly. "Cray's never been a respecter of lines. But I will say - at least this one's not a kid."

Katniss glanced from one to the other and wrinkled her nose. She tried to remind herself that she'd spent so much time removed from it all that what seemed foreign to her was ordinary to them. Anyway, time to focus on the task at hand.

After breakfast, Katniss wrapped her mother's shawl around her head and shoulders. It smelled like that strange combination of scents, bitter and sweet - coal dust and firewood - that she associated with home. The power of the memories it cast nearly knocked her off her feet. But Haymitch was grumbling impatiently, and she went outside with him.

Katniss followed a step and a half behind the older man and kept her eyes down. They avoided the town square and walked the fields toward the Seam. The summer grass was starting to burn at the tips and Katniss thought how similar it was to when she had left - early summer, just before the Reaping. As they approached the Seam, she puzzled again over the question of Gale - where on earth he was, why on earth he was wherever he was. At the end, she had offered him some token of forgiveness - perhaps it had not been wholehearted, she couldn't remember. The only thing she remembered was how she had felt the need to be so cautious with his feelings - to keep him at a bit of a remove, to not make him think she had bent to him in any way. It had been an oppressive feeling - a stilted goodbye and, probably, colder than she would have liked.

 _Prim and I will go to the lake_ , she had said. _Will we see you - on your way out?_

"Here we are," said Haymitch.

Then, abruptly, she was forced to puzzle over the mystery of Peeta. Haymitch had brought her to her own house - her childhood home - at the edge of the Seam.

"What?"

Her mother, who had followed a minute behind them, came up just then and touched her arm. "I live a few houses down, now. Peeta lives here."

Katniss blinked.

Inside, not much had changed. It was dustier than it should be - dark as it ever was. The curtains on the windows were a different color. There was a braided rug on the floor, some bright crockery on the table. But mostly, overwhelmingly, there was the smell of sickness - of urine, vomit - of menthol and herbs. Katniss put an instinctive hand to her face, over her mouth and nose.

Her mother pushed past her to the bedroom. Katniss didn't want to follow, but morbid curiosity forced her feet.

The woman in the bed was both thin, somehow, and swollen. The flesh was gone from her arms, from her neck and upper chest. But her face was swollen - her hair lying dankly over puffy white cheeks, her eyes half squeezed shut. A sheen of sweat - Katniss knew this sheen, the sweat of intense pain - made her skin glisten sickly.

"Katniss, this is Meliora Mellark. She's just a few years older than you, I think."

Meliora's breathing was very shallow. She turned, slightly, in the direction of Mrs. Everdeen's voice, but the motion was faint.

Katniss, reluctant but compelled, step forward to lightly touch the woman's clammy fingers. Peeta - granting he even survived - would never see his wife again. Katniss did not need to be a healer to understand this. "Will that even help?" she asked her mother, who was squeezing the feverfew elixir into a dropper.

"Not much. Not much."

"What about anything that I grabbed from the Mayor's …?"

Her mother paused - then turned to her. "None of it was morphling. Though, in the right combination - some of them might help. But it would be risky. It would be merciful, perhaps, but I couldn't do it without her consent."

Katniss swallowed.

Behind them, Haymitch coughed. "You have to get going. It's almost time and Cray's headed over. I'll stall him."

"Get rid of him," she told him. "If she's one of his - don't let him be one of the last people who sees her alive. Don't."

"Just go, Katniss."

Katniss slipped out of the house - gulped in the fresh air - and ran back through the hedges of the Meadow, back to the place in the fence where she used to slip out. The sight of the woods - of freedom - made her gut hurt. But there was still the crackle of electricity. Keeping the sound close to her left ear, she ran swiftly along the fence - down past the slag heaps, past the mine buildings, down to the open -

 _Crack_.

"Halt!"

The sound of the bullet firing just preceded the voice. Katniss ignored her instincts to obey the command and, just glancing behind her for a second, sped up instead.

Three Peacekeepers. Damn. She had ground on them. But not on their guns. She took a zig-zag path, losing ground a bit, but they would need some luck to hit her ...

 _Crack_.

A deathly smell - she was on the outskirts of the dump, now. Random bits of abandoned debris now made her path even more sporadic. But she was nimble and her eyes were picking out her road even as she ran - behind a pile of old pipes, around a bundle of barbed wire, over a mushy old mattress … she reached the southern corner of the fence, and could see - she could _see_ \- the gap in it. She just couldn't hear …

She stopped - spit at the fence. Nothing. She ventured a look behind her. They were scrambling now, two of them, around the junk. The third? She glanced around frantically - the third must have run around to more solid ground to cut her off on the other side. They thought they had her cornered.

She yanked at the rings of wire and pulled it open, and pushed herself through. She tumbled to the ground, rolled, then quickly to her feet again. Another glance back.

 _Crack_.

A stinging sensation on her face - she fell, blown back by the force of the passing bullet. _I'm not dead_ , she thought to herself in surprise. For a second, she stayed down, stunned, but then instinct and terror pulled her to her feet again.

There was a loud pop and a yell, cut suddenly short. One of the Peacekeepers had touched the fence and was flung back and lying still. The window was closed. Katniss almost laughed to herself, but they still had their guns.

She turned and fled, leaving them shouting and cursing behind her. She put her hand to her head and felt the warm gush of blood. Shit - that had been close. That had been as close as she had ever come.

She fled straight east, straight for the trees. No time to hide her tracks. She was already woozy. She had to get to the lake - fast. ( _Now what?_ she wondered to herself. _How do I fix this situation now?_ )

The familiar route through the trees seemed strange to her now; stranger than they had in last night's twilight walk. Everything was darker, a little crooked. Once she had to stop - she had to stop - pull her sweater sleeve over her fist and bunch it up against her forehead. She felt like she might vomit up eggs and spam.

She forced herself to move again, telling herself that it would take them some time to find her, maybe - they would fan out, they would be cautious - but find her they would. She wondered wryly just how far Peeta's pull with Cray extended. She wondered what Haymitch could do.

 _No_.

She did not rely on other people to keep her safe. She had her own weapons. She could hide, she could fight, she could run. She would not be taken.

Her blood was rushing in her ears as she stumbled out of the trees and into the sparkling sunlight. A shadow came slithering at her. "Heba," she whispered, falling to her knees as the dog came up to her, tail wagging. She pushed away the dog's wet, nuzzling nose and staggered up again and back into the concrete house.

There was something shiny about him that reminded her, uncomfortably, of the woman who was dying in her childhood house. But he was not still. His pale chest moved softly, up and down. With shaking hands she extracted the needle and the vial. Filled the needle. Knelt down beside him.

Warmth radiated off of his skin. His face in its drugged sleep was pain-free and peaceful. A bit content. All the time she had been caring for him before, the worry - the defeat - in his face had troubled her. _He could have mentioned a wife_ , she thought to herself, grasping his arm, squeezing it until the veins started darkening. He was so close and secretive. Which was strange, because something about him opened her up - she felt vulnerable; this sensation of trust he encouraged had hit her out of nowhere.

 _If you leave, you leave that behind. Forever._

 _Now - that is odd_ , she thought, startled by the memory of Gale's strange accusations.. Because that is not what she had left behind. Or, at least - she hadn't thought so. (Needle poised on the vein. Her fingers shaking so all her concentration had to be on this. She just hated this part. Easier to stick a bear with an arrow than penetrate human flesh with this tiny metal point …. Just get past this and then wrap up my head and then ….)

She stood up, wavered - almost lost her balance. Then the room went dark.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

* * *

In a world full of nothing

Though it's not love, it means something.

\- Martin L. Gore

* * *

The sharp, insistent knocking roused Peeta from sleep. He shuffled to the door, befuddled - and a bit annoyed. It was May 9th - and he had had a hard time sleeping the night before. Restless and edgy, he had actually taken a long walk along the eastern and southern perimeter of the District until dawn. Then he had attempted to eat, attempted to sleep - and had finally just managed it.

A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky as he opened the door. Standing in the rain, soaking wet, was Meliora Tanner, her arms crossed over her chest, her long hair dripping.

"Let me in," she said.

He opened the door wider and she sprinted in.

"Thanks," she said, straining her skirt, her tank top and her hair until the water puddled on his dusty floor. "Cray's in a mood. He's locked me out of his house. He had his goons kick me out of the boxcar. I don't dare sneak into Victors' Village."

He pulled a chair away from the table and made an accommodating gesture, but she shook her head.

He regarded her wryly for a moment. She was the strangest part of his life, now - this homeless prostitute, cut off, like him, from her Merchant family. Isolated, an outcast. That was where the similarities between them ended, of course.

She pulled a band out of her hair and loosened the wet strands, then started rebraiding it. Being wet, it was darker than normal, and something about the gesture - and perhaps something about his current state of sensitivity - plucked a string inside his guts. The reverberation was silent, but painful. It highlighted the chasm inside him. A Katniss-sized hole, as he had put it to himself at some point during his wanderings of yesterday. Four years old now.

But it was, he realized now, even larger than Katniss. There was something completely unfinished about his life. He wished he had gone to the Games. Difficult to explain how that could possibly have improved his life in any way. Unless, perhaps, that he would have died with purpose, with cause, instead of living this shiftless life.

"What?" she said to him. He realized that he was gaping at her, mesmerized by the movement of her fingers in her hair.

"Nothing. Just - what are you going to do?"

She shrugged. "Cray will come around. The sooner I mention Darius and Theoph in the same sentence, the sooner he'll remember at least one reason that he keeps me around."

Peeta cringed as she laughed. They were - for lack of a better term - each other's only real friend, and she had told him secrets about Cray he often wished he didn't know.

"I don't know how you do it," he said to her, changing the subject hastily.

"Do what?" she asked, her laughter turning immediately to a scowl.

"Put up with Cray."

"I don't know," she replied. "I like to eat."

"There have to be other options."

"Really. Tell me, then."

"Don't be sarcastic. I'm being sincere. I don't think I could do it - sleep with someone like that."

"What do you mean?" she asked, harshly. "He's a gross human being, but underneath that, he's just a naked body, pretty much like any other. It's simple enough."

"I don't - I don't think I could do it. I couldn't separate love and sex like that."

"Oh, my god. You haven't done it, have you? For real."

"I …."

"Oh, no, don't stammer. No one who has actually had sex ever talks about it like that. Holy shit, Peeta."

He refused to embarrass. "You've known me a couple of years, now. You know I don't hang out with - anyone."

"Yeah," she said. "You know they have next to nothing to do with each other, right? Love and sex? Sex is - whatever your brain happens to want it to be at the time. Love - sure, if you believe in that shit. Pleasure. Lust. Punishment. Abuse. It can mean almost anything."

He smiled - but to his alarm he felt the flush creep up his body, up his chest and neck and into his cheeks. "Well, my brain happens to want it to mean something - important."

She squinted at him. She was looking into his eyes, but he sensed that she was seeing right through him. He averted his eyes and watched a drop of water from her dark braid trickle down her chest and disappear in the seam of her top. "You know there's no orphan princess out there waiting for you to kiss her problems away - right?"

Oh, yes. That he did know. "Of course," he swallowed. "I'm not a child. I'm just not … cynical."

"You need to do someone and get it over with," she said. "I legitimately don't think I can talk to a virgin."

The room seemed to close in around him. "Are you offering?" he asked. He told himself that he was trying to diffuse the sudden change of mood with a joke - but later, he couldn't really be sure.

"Ah," she said, her mouth twisting. "I thought it would come to this."

"I wasn't - asking," he protested.

She moved to him, stood against him for a moment, then leaned in and whispered into his neck, "You're a shit liar, Mellark."

He tried to swallow down the sudden uprising of his breath, but he almost choked himself in the process. The pain inside him localized, abruptly, to one specific point on his body. "OK," he replied. "I'm a liar."

"Tell me what you want," she breathed.

"Prove me wrong," he said.

* * *

Afterward, Melly sat down on the edge of the bed and again started re-braiding her hair. It was drying now - blond and flat.

Peeta stared at her bare back and a sense of unreality crept over him. He supposed he was satiated - that's what he knew he should feel - but really what he mostly felt was a lingering discontent. He was not satisfied. He was still unfinished. No - he was completely undone. Everything he had avoided thinking about his life was now confirmed. All possibility of love was dead and this sordid, twisted encounter in the rainstorm with a woman who had given herself to the town pervert … this was the best it would ever be.

"Thank you," he said. After all - what else could he say? She had given to him for free what she usually sold for profit.

She turned and blinked at him. The storm was over and the light was rising in his bedroom. Sunlight made her blink.

He scooted over to her, feeling sorry - and also strange for feeling sorry. Tentatively, he put a hand on her shoulder and kissed the back of her neck.

She shook her head. "Don't go sentimental on me."

"I'm not," he said. "Only -."

"Only what?"

"Only - I feel like I've taken advantage of you."

"Oh, god."

"You don't have to live like this."

She stood abruptly and put on her top and panties. "I live the way I live. For now. Later - who knows?"

"You could at least stay with me."

Her eyes widened in surprise. "No. No - Peeta. That might mean trouble for me. It would certainly be no good for you."

He licked his lips. For the first - and only - time he was tempted to divulge his secrets. That there was no possibility of her ever coming between him and another woman, because no such woman existed anymore. And that being the case, his own reputation meant next to nothing. Instead, he said: "I don't mean - for this. I mean as my friend. I wouldn't expect anything from you. But also - you wouldn't have to go back to Cray."

"It's complicated with Cray."

He looked up and pondered her tight, closed-off expression. "It looks simple enough," he said.

"No," she said harshly. "It's simple for you. You think - oh, here's this girl I know and she's so damaged at least she'll hang out with me. But also it's so embarrassing how damaged she is, and now I've slept with her and I - lily-fingered-Mellark - don't sleep with hookers. So, I'll just ride in and save her from herself - meaning, save me from an embarrassing, emasculating situation."

He closed his eyes and absorbed the blow. He couldn't deny it - he actually admired her for standing up for herself this way. "Maybe so," he said. "But I still hear no reasons why you shouldn't move in with me. I won't tell you what to do - or not do. But there's no reason to do it homeless. You're the one who said it - sex is whatever you make it out in your head to be. And I - for whatever reason - I can't pretend that I love you, in that way. Although I do care about your wellbeing. Enough to want you to stick around, to be safe. If I feel like having sex with you gives me the right to offer this - well, OK."

"I'll never feel about sex the way you feel about sex."

"So, what? I know how I feel and I … well, I don't know how you feel. But, let's just say I know you did me a favor, and leave it at that."

Abruptly, she bent down and kissed him. Kissed him like she hadn't before, even when she had been easing him out of his clothes, loosening up his last-minute resistance to her embrace. This was hard and wet and it took him a beat too long to figure out how to respond.

"Good," she said, her eyes darkening as she pulled away from him. "You really don't, do you?"

He swallowed. "What?" he asked fuzzily.

"You really don't want me. Not me."

"I'm … sorry?"

"Don't be. Makes it easier. In the long run. Doesn't mean you won't want it - sometimes. In weak moments. Doesn't mean you won't feel - sometimes - that I owe you, for taking me in. You'll fight it - but you will feel it."

He shook his head.

She gave him a wry smirk. "You only have one bed here."

"There's - a couch."

She shrugged. "I'll still be at Cray's, more often than not. Even when he doesn't want me in bed, he likes me around."

"Shit, Melly, that's …."

"It's what it is. Take it - or leave it."

* * *

It was the whining of the dog that woke him. It took a long time - he could hear it, in his sleep, this whimpering that would not go away. He kept pushing away from the sound, trying to move, maneuver away from it. But it permeated every crack in his sleep, and eventually, unable to resist anymore, he reluctantly opened his eyes.

He sat up. The light was dim - he felt cold. He looked down at himself, confused - strangely enough - to feel so lucid again. He was naked. There was a needle in his arm. And a girl sprawled on the floor at his feet.

He pushed himself over to her - turned her around, and gasped. Her face was covered in her own dried blood, from a gash on her forehead. There was no dripping blood. But she had lost quite a bit of it. It was in brown spots all over the floor, all over her dark sweater and her hair and her hands.

"Katniss," he said. "Katniss."

Damn it. He looked down at his own leg, remembering. And saw that the faint lines were growing fainter - whatever she had stuck him with was working in his favor. He swallowed and looked around.

Testing his leg he found that, infection or no, the break was still a huge problem. Nonetheless, he had to move. So he gently extracted the bow out from under her and, using it as a crutch, got to his feet. He found one of her wooden cups and hobbled outside.

He was dazzled by the sun that was setting directly in his eyes, dipping below the hills and illuminating the water of a lake that was spread out before him. He looked back and gazed at the place she had brought him - a small concrete hut, its roof and windows covered by branches of dried leaves.

The dog was sitting outside now and she looked up, sniffed the air in his general direction, and then put her head back down. Peeta took some comfort in her seeming sense of calm. But not much.

He struggled down to the water, sweating and biting his lip against the painful grunts that wanted to erupt at every step. He filled a cup and fought against a fainting feeling that came over him the more he walked. This wasn't going to do. He needed a splint.

But first, he knelt back down next to her and, wetting his fingers, stroked her skin, cleaning around the deep scratch on her forehead and gently saying her name. "Katniss," he said. "Katniss."

It was about five minutes before she stirred. When she did, it was just like when she woke up from a normal sleep - she sat up abruptly, instantly alert. She gasped, then swayed.

"Steady," he said. "Steady. You've lost a fair amount of blood."

She blinked up at him as if she didn't know him, then sighed. "Peeta - you're awake."

He smiled briefly and held the cup for her while she took a long drink. "Awake - and much better, thanks to you. But you shouldn't have done it. You were _seen_."

She nodded. "Yes. I don't know how much time we have."

He shook his head. "You mean how much time _I_ have. You can get out of here at any time, and you should. Me - they can find. No big deal."

She bit her lip and looked at him over the rim of the cup. "They'll search in small groups, and I can hold off small groups. If you're taken back … it doesn't matter that you aren't me. It will matter that you're found out here with no excuse for being out here. Or - no good excuse."

He wondered what he had said during that dim, uncertain foggy time before she had drugged him and left. And then he abruptly remembered - his friend, Meliora, dying without him, perhaps already dead. (Though she had been insensible to company by the time he had left, and they had said their strange little good-byes, already. 'Mellark,' she had said, and he had waited for it - some long overdue thanks for taking her in, for covering her secrets. He had made some sacrifices for her which made this last one - though it had nearly killed him - pale in comparison. But: 'Mellark, you're still too naive for words.' That was the last thing she had ever said to him.)

"Katniss," he said, "did you see your mother?"

She eyed him for a moment. "Yes. And I made your delivery."

He couldn't read in her face exactly what she knew, and, anyway, it would all take too much time to explain - time they definitely didn't have. "How did you get the drugs for me?"

At this she smiled, and shrugged. "Broke into the mayor's house. But that ended up for the best, as I ended up running into Haymitch as a result. Well - not all the consequences were positive," she amended, putting her hand up to her forehead.

"I think you'll be OK, though you seem to have lost an awful lot of blood."

"That was a close one," she said.

He couldn't believe how calm she was. "We have to get you on your feet."

"And you on yours," she added briskly.

"Yes - I can't walk much. I need a splint and crutches. If I couldn't get you up just now, I was going to go back out and look for some good branches."

She nodded. "I need some broth. I might faint if I try to walk right now." She pointed to a corner of the room.

He brought her the little iron pot in which she had made the broth earlier - there was just a little left at the bottom of it. She finished it and then looked at him ruefully. "I'm sorry there isn't more."

He took the pot from her, set it down, and wiped the sweat away from her upper lip. "It's OK," he said. "I'm just sorry my little expedition derailed your plans. What are you going to do?"

She let out a long breath. "First thing is, we need to clear out of here. I can hide from anyone, but this place sticks out like a sore thumb. Not only do we need to get out of here, we need to try to clear out any traces that we were here." She looked around in regret at the pelts, dishes and miscellany - some of which were left over from her initial occupation of this place with Prim. "So - I'll make you your splint. While I'm looking for some wood, can you gather everything in this room together in a pile? Your clothes, by the way, are over there."

"Right. Then, what?"

"Into the woods, as quickly as we can, and outwait the search party. Same as last time," she added with a bemused smile. "And when we have, we sneak you back in. And you can get some messages in for me. You have strange allies, Peeta Mellark."

He looked at her steadily. She had seemingly learned a lot in her short time in District Twelve. Allies. That was a good one. No friends, lovers, family. Allies. "You're really not scared, are you?" he asked her.

She paused in the motion of getting to her feet, and looked up at him. Their faces were quite close and he could see the flecks of brown in her dark gray eyes. "Of course, I am. But fear is either a barrier - or it is fuel. It's your choice, really."

* * *

The sun was down by the time Katniss had finished a splint, cast her old belongings into the lake, swept up the dust in which their footprints might show and kicked dirt over her firepit. Peeta spent most of this time learning to walk with makeshift crutches. He was, by now, incredibly hungry, but she gave him some wild mint to chew on to settle his stomach, promising that when they got deeper into the woods, she would be able to find more to eat. More than once, he stopped in the middle of offering to stay back, wait for the hunt to find him - throw them off her scent, if he could. But he knew what she would say. Allies, she had said. And he knew what that meant. She had thrown her lot in with him.

Before they left the hut, he took a moment to look back east, back in the direction of Twelve. He wondered if it was over, yet, with Melly, and tried to sort through all the complicated things that made him feel. Then, he followed Katniss.

Katniss led them, as quickly as he was capable, around the lip of the lake, crossing its pebbly beach, before walking up and away from the water, back into the trees. This was a thick and exceptionally dark section of the woods, the firs growing close to each other. When Peeta looked up, he could not see the stars. The ground was also soft with a thick, undisturbed carpet of old needles, so their tread was quite soft.

Heba followed them, but at a varying distance. Sometimes, Peeta was startled to hear her soft snuffling right at his ankles, as if she was urging him forward.

He wasn't sure how long it was, it felt like many hours, before Katniss stopped abruptly. He caught up to her, hobbling and breathing hard. She leaned against a tree, and he could see she was breathing hard herself. "Sit down," she ordered.

He did not sit so much as collapse, gratefully, against a tree.

"You can sleep if you want," she told him. "I'm pretty well rested and we only have five or so hours before dawn."

"Thanks, I - thanks. I don't know why you are doing this for me, but - thanks."

"I might be the strangest of your allies," she replied.

"Oh - I don't know about that," he smiled. "Look, Katniss, I can't really remember everything we talked about before you left, but you should know …."

"Your wife is dying," she said.

Ah. He pursed his lips. "You think I don't know that?"

"Feverfew wasn't going to do much. Not enough to risk - everything."

He wiped his forehead. "I know. But it was the most I could do - do you understand how helpless that feels? And - I needed to get away for a minute. I don't know how to explain this to you. I couldn't always handle being there."

"I mean _dying_ , Peeta. Like - to the extent where it was reckless to leave her, at all. You should be there - when your wife dies. And I can almost guarantee that won't happen, now."

Peeta frowned into the darkness. It wasn't her business - it really wasn't. Except that it was. Everything was her business; every last aspect of his life, even the secrets - she just would never know the full extent. "Melly," he said. "Is not my wife."


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

* * *

 _yes, in spite of all,_  
 _Some shape of beauty moves away the pall_  
 _From our dark spirits._

"Endymion." John Keats

* * *

 **A/N: You've been patient, guys, and since this chapter was written pretty much concurrently with the last one - here it is.**

"Prim. Prim, wake up."

The early light was peeking in between the green leaves and branches that were draped over the windows, and Katniss, having spent nearly all night in a torment of indecision, could wait no longer.

Primrose Everdeen, thin and pale - and smaller than her twelve years - nonetheless looked fresh-faced and bright-eyed as she blinked awake. Katniss gazed down at her fondly - and guiltily.

No, Katniss would never have children - not Gale's, not anyone's. And Prim was exactly the reason why. Katniss could remember the day she was born as if it was yesterday, though she herself had only been three and a half at the time. Her mother's cries and her dad's anxious pacing around the house - it had been the very first time that Katniss had felt that sense of terror that comes with everyday life. The knowledge that everyone is one circumstance, one slip, one breath of fate away from having one's heart ripped out. It was much later that she would realize that she was born into circumstances that made such a thing more inevitable than not.

Afterwards, looking at the little red face in the bed - her mother and father both so happy and relieved - Katniss had accepted the joy of it and had fallen instantly in love with her little sister. But she would never shake the memory - that the two things are companions to each other. The greater the joy, in fact, the worse the potential heartbreak. So, Katniss had measured her capacity for joy - for love - very carefully (and why not? her mother's family did not speak to them - her father's family was all dead - of want, of lung disease, of everything). Her father's death had only amplified this resolve. Even her pragmatic friendship with Gale had served as an antidote: at any time, he might get caught, by man or beast or simpering girl, and leave her alone again. So, she had held off on anything other than a basic affection for him.

And even that had soured.

So too her love for her father, who had been buried in the ground, his body never recovered. So too her love for her mother, whose abandonment of her after his death had never been forgiven.

This was what she had left: her sister, who was like her own child. She had always taken care of her. And she always would.

But sometimes, even Prim must be left on her own.

"I'm sorry, little duck. I'm sorry to wake you. I have to go hunting today - I just have to get out, see if there's anything to see - and bring us some fresh meat."

The smaller girl swallowed. There had been fish, berries and wild vegetables in plenty. She knew that food was not the urgent reason for Katniss to leave. "Do you think mom has got any of your messages?"

"I want to check that," said Katniss, nodding. In fact, it was three weeks now, since they had slipped away from District Twelve. This year's reaping would have taken place. Time for Gale to start making his own moves. She still hoped he would come to see her on his way out to … wherever he planned to go. "I want you to go out, do your business, wash up in the lake - then I will leave, just for an hour or two, and you must be very still and quiet."

The problem would be - as always - that once any search parties spotted the lake house, the jig would be up. That was the peril of staying here. Katniss thought that if they moved a little further, up toward the hills, perhaps they would eventually find a cave for shelter, or something. Right now, she could only count on the fact that they had laid the evidence for disappearance on the other side of the district entirely. No reason to come out this way.

Prim was content here - comfortable enough; convinced that they were in a place that, their father having known of it, their mother could be persuaded to come. For her sake, Katniss kept putting off the inevitable, another day, another week ….

She had left messages for Gale in the places where they always hid their weapons - quick notes for him and for her mother, burned into pieces of bark or scraped into wide, flat leaves - easy to disguise from amateur eyes, but obvious to him who always looked for signs and clues. She knew he probably hadn't read them, yet. That he would have avoided hunting, at least in their usual spots, until the uproar died down in Twelve. But soon - it would be very soon.

This morning she went deep into the woods, heading not to one of their normal spots, but one which she was almost certain he'd go to, anyway, when he did leave. He had spent the past year exploring these new spots in what she now realized was the direction he had planned to take when he left Twelve.

It was such a curious clearing. Katniss wasn't sure how it had happened - the trees flattened backwards, as if by a very small, very localized explosion. She thought it most likely was one of the traps the Capitol had set around Twelve, back in the Dark Days, that had been triggered, somehow. A sonic explosion, probably, since there were no burns or scorch marks evident. The trees would have grown close to each other, in a nearly perfect little circle, because they radiated out now in a nearly perfect larger circle.

Or, perhaps, it had been done on purpose, the trees felled and arranged in this clock-like circle. A signal, perhaps, that could be seen from the air. A target, maybe. That was a more mysterious - also a more alluring - idea. But she supposed she would never know.

Regardless, it was, as they had discovered over the winter, a good place to hunt bear and wild boar. The grubs and small creatures that had made their homes in the hollowed-out trunks of the overturned trees were like a waiting buffet for the sleepy, hungry animals in the cold months.

Katniss crept into the clearing, carefully, her eyes looking for any sign that Gale had been there recently. She was not really expecting to find anything - which is why when she did, she almost did not believe her eyes.

She bent down and examined it a moment before picking it up. It was set down on top of one of the fallen trees, so it could not be there by accident. The small wooden disk with a bird carved into it - the one she had found, in the flowers, on the day Gale told her that he was going to leave the District. She had given it to him - and then forgotten it.

A sudden snapping sound - foot tread on branch - startled her, and she hastily straightened and turned around, her heart in her throat.

She swept the area with her eyes - there were so many trees here, and they were so dense. Carefully, quietly, she slipped the disk into her pocket and pulled out an arrow.

She wanted to say his name. She wanted to - every instinct in her screamed it. But if she was wrong ….

Then she smiled and relaxed. She saw the deer - a buck, actually; huge, with a full head of antlers - lurch between two trees. She let the arrow go.

For the space of a breath, she thought she had got it. It stumbled and she thought it fell to the ground. But she was wrong. Exhale … and it was sprinting away from her, tacking sharply south. Since that was the direction of the lake, anyway, she followed after it. But a sense of unease - of something not quite right - pursued her.

* * *

Katniss walked tentatively into the clearing, her sense of unease returning as if ten years hadn't passed. This place had haunted her nightmares, and she wasn't sure why, really, unless it was that there was still something so deliberate and strange about the place - something unnatural.

Regardless, it was as good a place as it always was to find food. She had soon tracked down a quail's nest and was cooking eggs on some rocks in a small firepit before Peeta woke up.

"Is that safe?" he asked blearily.

"Eggs don't take long to cook," she said brusquely. "You need to get some strength back."

She had brought a couple of things with her from the cabin - among them one rough wooden spoon. She fed him directly from the rock, then ate her own share. She cleaned the spoon off as well as she could in the early morning dew and buried the small fire.

"There, you see? Simple enough."

"Those were the best eggs I've ever had in my life."

She smiled. "My cooking is at its best when I serve the starving." That was an old quote of Sae's, she remembered suddenly. She wondered if Sae was still around. "I have questions," she told him.

He smiled back. "I'm sure you do. But - if you recall - you wouldn't answer mine."

"Circumstances have changed," she replied. "I might answer them, now. But I go first."

He nodded. "Of course."

She wrinkled her mouth, wondering with which among a plethora of questions she should start. Finally, she decided to pursue the most immediate line. "You told me you had something on Cray. That something is so strong that he's been keeping the secret of your disappearance - all this time. When I was in Twelve, no one but him and my mother seemed to know you were gone."

"Well, that's something. I mean - if someone had really come looking for me, I guess there's not much he could have done. But when you're married to one of Cray's girls, people don't necessarily come dropping by all the time. And, of course …."

"You said you _weren't_ married to her."

"No, I'm not, but everyone does think that I am. It's really Cray who is."

" _What_?"

He shrugged. "Sort of. Technically, Cray can't actually marry her. It's not allowed in the Peacekeeper ranks, and Cray had a wife - and a child, too, I believe - back in the Capitol. Though that marriage was probably dissolved, and anyway Cray could never go back. It was District Twelve or jail for him."

"What did he do?"

"What _didn't_ he do? Blackmail, manslaughter - and his appetites have always been the same."

"Who would marry someone like that?"

Peeta twisted his mouth. "Melly would. Wait, that sounds bad; worse than it really is. I - it's difficult to explain. To explain Melly would be to understand her, and I never really have. And I've been closer than most. The main thing is - she was orphaned and then raised by relatives who abused her. Whatever she was before that - and I think there was a basically decent person; I've seen it every once in awhile - but whatever she was before that was warped, truly warped. She's angry - and almost completely without loyalties. She is strongly attracted to unsavory people because she thinks they are fundamentally honest. Any hint of niceness she distrusts instinctively - she thinks kindness is a facade."

Katniss narrowed her eyes at him. It was more than she had asked - that always made her suspicious - but perhaps he did need to talk through this odd situation. "But she trusted _you_."

He laughed. "Yes - I know it's not much of a character reference. Melly and I were kind of thrown together, through mutual isolation. There were things she knew about Cray and she didn't like being the only one who knew them. So, she told me. I don't know about trust - but I guess it's as close as she could get."

"Yet - she 'married' him."

He shook his head. "People are complicated. I mean - in some ways, it _is_ simple. He paid her and she didn't want to stop being paid. She maybe had a sense - a misguided sense - of place with him. She had been without a place in anyone's life for so long and by no means was she his only girl, but she was … the longest. The one who was somehow most important to him. And - she tried - I do think she tried - to wean him from the worst of his impulses. Sometimes, she paid off girls - especially first-time girls - to leave Cray's house.

"I can't speak for Cray. There is no excuse for what he is - for everything that he did. But - she means something to him. In whatever small part of him is still human, she touches that part of him. I guess I understand this a little because … no matter how different she and I were, there was a little part of her - that isolated part - that was similar to mine. And, like I said, occasionally you could see the girl she might have been."

"But why would you - cover for them?"

"It just - happened. She and I were friends and I offered once - genuinely offered - to marry her and give her a reason to be rid of him. She stayed with me when she wasn't with him - she had nowhere else to go. And I - I was less lonely during those times, despite the fact that she doesn't bring a lot of joy along with her. But she wouldn't agree to it - until she got pregnant. Then Cray arranged some bogus paperwork and we told people we had a private toasting and then it was done."

"She has a _child_? With _Cray_? How old?"

Peeta shook his head. He closed his eyes briefly as if on a painful memory. "No - she had a miscarriage. It's one of the things that led to her cancer diagnosis. Did - did you see her?"

"Yes."

"Not two years ago, she looked very different. It's been horrible. Watching her waste away. Watching pain take over her life. I'm not proud of this, but - many times I've wanted just to walk away from it all. This time wasn't my first outside the fence. Several times, I've just wanted to get out of it. Caring for her was not even the biggest burden. It was the expectation that I should care more than I _did_. That's a pretense - a facade - a farce - that can be so hard to keep up all the time. Sometimes, I separate myself from everything and she has seemed to me like just the living embodiment of the futility of my life here. So - yes. You're right. There was little that a bunch of flowers could do. But it was the _most_ I could do. And - it kept me focused on her, not on myself. I have no right to feel sorry for myself. She's the one in pain. She's the one who is dying - and her life. _Fuck_ \- her life. What a horrific waste."

After a long pause, she blinked at him. "It's a lot to give up - even for a friend. Pretending to be married to someone who everyone knows is going to Cray."

"I didn't get _nothing_ in return," he said. At her expression, he hastily added, "Oh, not that - I don't mean that. I mean, I won't lie - we tried that, and it didn't go anywhere. It's just that - after you died - I mean, after you left - I kind of fell apart a little. Or a lot, actually. And then my brother died and my whole family fell apart. It took everything I had to piece together some spark of motivation to keep on going. Melly gave me companionship - and she gave me secrets, like I said. And they were useful, occasionally. It's not just Melly that has tried to keep Cray in check. And it was good - to have some information. Better than nothing, anyway."

She sorted through his statements, but, despite her curiosity about his brother and Melly and Cray, only one thing really struck her. "I had no idea - I really didn't - that you thought of me at all, let alone …."

"Loved you?"

In the silence that fell, abruptly, at his words, some crows overhead cackled, their calls echoing among the trees. Katniss thought, uneasily, of the spying birds from the Dark Days - jabberjays - extinct, now, or so they said. "If that's what it was," she said at last.

He looked at her, and his expression was so hungry. She tried to remember what Gale had looked like, during his own declaration (and the arguments that had followed), but she could not really call up any similarities. The Peeta and Gale from her childhood seemed to exist in quite different parts of her memory - connected, somehow, but never really touching. "If it wasn't," he said, "then how come the moment I saw you again - even when I didn't believe it was you - everything came back again, the exact same emotions? I could look at your face all day, all night. I could listen to your voice - it's like the beginning and the end of the world. It hurts - it hurts everything inside me. And I wish I had somehow managed to tell you before."

She searched for some meaningful response to this, but could find nothing. She could not pretend that she had come anywhere close to feeling this way about him - nor could she pretend that what he was saying wasn't somehow having an impact on her now. "You make me almost glad I've never been in love," she responded. "I don't handle pain very well."

"Then I'm glad, too. And I'm glad - I'm glad that I got the chance to tell you."

She stared at him. She wanted to trust him. She wanted it more than she could remember wanting anything - ever. And that frightened her. Hearing about his wife had been almost a relief - an out, a quick way to sever whatever had started up with her in the cabin. Now, she no longer had that excuse. When she had watched him sleep, again the desire had come over her to kiss his forehead, as she had by the lake. His fever then had seared her lips. She knew it would not feel the same, now. She wondered how it would feel.

"For what it's worth," she said, "I'm glad you did, too." Then she shrugged, and, attempting to act as if this was just an everyday occurrence - a casual period on this part of the conversation - she wriggled over to him, touched his hand with the tips of her fingers, and bent down to kiss him on the cheek. Perhaps it was not fever-hot, but it was warm, warm like a summer day, and she was, now, too.

"What was that for?" he croaked.

"I don't know," she said, frankly. "It just seems like - you deserve something, after what you've been through."

He smiled. "Katniss," he said, "if I've learned one thing over the years it's that people don't 'deserve' kisses - they should be given and taken freely, or not at all."

She blushed - and almost pulled away. But she found it _impossible_. "These are things I've never learned," she said. Then she closed her eyes and touched her lips to his.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

* * *

For in this world  
I say there dwells a spirit and she lives  
Hidden even from the gods, and of her face  
Zeus has not dreamed. She is consuming, fierce,  
Beautiful and withheld. She layeth waste  
The gardens of men's flesh-and I am She.

 _Selene_. Anna Hempstead Branch

* * *

"It's about time, don't you think, Katniss?"

There was a hitch in Katniss' stride, but she didn't say the first words that popped into her head. This matter of Prim's burgeoning love life was not comfortable territory for her; always, she had to measure her words, her reactions. She liked the boy - she did - a tall and handsome boy from District Eleven who had run off in trouble after attempting to stop a Peacekeeper from whipping his grandmother. He was gentle, but there was a fire in his dark eyes (like there was a fire in everyone here, and sometimes Katniss wanted to tell them to calm down, settle down - she had removed Prim from trouble, and these people all seemed to want to walk deliberately back into it). He seemed innocent enough, as well. He had been thirteen when he had fled his home, and he was actually just eighteen now, two years younger than Prim.

"Katniss?"

"Time," Katniss told her sister, "is a relative thing. It's not so much about the right time as the right person, don't you think?"

"I don't know," said Prim.

"No more do I," Katniss sighed. "You have more experience with boys than I do, now."

"That doesn't have to be," Prim said. "You know that -."

Katniss stopped. "No, Prim. I'm happy for you - or, I'm trying to be. But there is no one here for me."

"How do you know if you don't -."

"I just know."

They stood in silence for a moment. It was dark and they couldn't see each other's expressions.

"I just want you to be sure," Katniss said, at last, "that you are careful. Kisses are one thing. Getting pregnant - I'd strongly advise against it."

She could hear the blush in Prim's voice. "Katniss …."

"Someone has to say it."

"What do you think mom would think?"

Katniss sighed to herself and started walking again. She tried not to take it personally, but, every once in awhile, this still came up - Prim's longing for their mother's advice. Not that Katniss didn't sometimes agree. Something like this - where her own experience was so lacking - was a perfect example.

There were others to consult now - older men and women whom they had joined in this strange little band of refugees. By following the direction of the red-haired boy and girl, Katniss and Prim had accidentally joined in on a pilgrimage route to Thirteen. Rumor throughout the Districts had peopled Thirteen and it had taken on a somewhat mystical quality for them: a city outside the influence of the Capitol. So, if they managed to escape, they made for it. Katniss had pitied their delusions, and then she had been proven wrong.

She still held herself somewhat aloof from them. A lifetime of keeping people at a distance, followed by eight years of near-solitary existence - this was not easy to break, nor did she feel the impulse. And she was worried - worried about their half-baked plans to form a new rebellion, to approach Thirteen. And some of them were from the Capitol, and she was especially wary of these. Except maybe one or two.

"I don't know what mom would think, Prim. And you are an adult now, so what really matters is what you think."

"I don't know, Katniss. When I'm with him, I feel … I feel like nothing else matters. Have you never felt that way - even with Gale?"

"Gale?" Katniss laughed awkwardly. "No. Anyway, I was a kid last time I saw him."

"You were sixteen and he was eighteen. That's not all that young for District Twelve. Didn't you …?"

"No - oh - did you really think so? Well, to be honest, that's what Gale thought, too. That's what we argued about before we left. I didn't handle that well. Nor did he."

"Did you kiss him?"

Katniss paused on the answer. "Yes - once. Right before we left. Like I said - I didn't handle it well. What you describe - I didn't feel it. Maybe I would have - one day - once everything smoothed over. But I don't know. I doubt it."

"I miss him."

Katniss smiled. "I do, too, sometimes. Before he thought kissing was a good idea, he was good company. And - I think I'd trust his judgement around these people more than my own."

"Katniss."

Both girls started as a figure shifted in the darkness and moved to intercept their path. They were getting close to the meeting spot.

"Hey, Cinna," she replied.

* * *

At some point during the kiss, Katniss felt Peeta's hand brush her cheek as he gently pushed her hair away, and a strange (vaguely frightening but mostly delicious) tingling sensation washed over her. She shuddered and sighed against his mouth as she pulled away. For a moment they looked at each other, intimate strangers - and Katniss felt blurry and off-kilter. Memories came at her in dizzy waves - a white-headed boy with a bruised face; a bruising wrestler, broad-shouldered and calm in the ring; a sleeping man, moon-tail face, drugged and passive, mumbling her name in his sleep.

"I should have waited for you," he had murmured. "I knew I should have waited."

She knew him, but didn't know him. His lips fitted against hers as if that had been their sole design. But when she pulled away, all the things she didn't know or understand about him came back to throw all her doubts into sharp relief. Who was he, really?

Then he smiled and she knew that it didn't matter. This was both the beginning and the end. She was allowed to feel this onslaught of emotions because they were there to be felt - and she did not need to analyze them, because time was unlikely to permit it.

She hunted around for the right words. "I liked that," she finally said.

"So did I," he replied. "I … don't understand it. But so did I."

She straightened up and started patting her mussy hair. She must look absolutely dreadful, but he was gazing at her as if she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. "I don't really understand it, either, but then - I don't have a whole lot of experience in this - area."

"And this isn't the most ideal time to gain it," he replied, with a touch of irony.

"No," she agreed. "And yet - here we are."

"I wish …" he began. Then he stopped. "It doesn't matter, now."

"Tell me."

"Why is it so important for you to know?"

She bit her lip and turned away. "Because I'm trying to understand what it is you are doing to me."

"What do you mean?"

"I should have left you," she said, "to your own devices. The stakes are too high - the odds are too narrow. Sorry, I -."

"Don't be. I agree with you. But sometimes we can only be true to our own natures. Perhaps it is not in you to abandon the wounded."

"No - only the whole. Is that what you mean?"

He sighed and pushed himself up so that he was sitting straighter against the tree. "Don't beat yourself up about that. You did what you felt you had to do, and who can truly blame you? Everything that followed - every repercussion - was on the rest of us. I can't remember much about what we talked about when you first found me - if I acted resentful at all, know that I don't have any right to it. You didn't know how I felt about you, so you are not responsible for how I reacted to your disappearance. I made bad decisions - and the rest of what happened to me is the Capitol's fault, anyway, or Cray's, or - or - just life's."

She squinted at him. "I side-tracked myself, before. I was trying to understand what kind of information you had - on Cray. I take it that it's more than you just covering for his relationship with Melly."

Peeta let out a breath. "Yes. Like I said, I know some specifics about what he did to get himself sent to Twelve. And a couple of other things. He - when he has information on the Merchants, he shakes them down for goods. He … assaulted someone from the Capitol - during a Reaping, no less. And - speaking of Reapings - he has occasionally tried to rig them."

" _What_?"

Peeta nodded, but looked away from her. "Yeah - when he's resisted by people he tries to shake down, or by people who make too much of a stink - he punishes their families, or threatens to. There's less of that since Theoph came, maybe."

"But that's - but that's …."

"I know. It's murder." The word - seditious, rebellious - lingered in the air for a moment. "But it _all_ is, Katniss. And the blood is on all of our hands. It takes a while to fully incorporate that knowledge - to actually _feel_ it. But it is. … There's something else, too - something that would make you showing up in District Twelve extremely uncomfortable for Cray."

She shook her head. "Haymitch said something like that, too. What do you mean? I have nothing to do with him."

"When I said before that you were thought to be murdered - I mean, someone was actually _accused_ of your murder. And sent to the Capitol for punishment."

Her eyes widened. "Not - Gale."

"No," Peeta said. "Although … Cray told Melly it _was_ Gale, and so I've thought it for ages. In fact, he said Gale confessed to it before he disappeared. But - that clearly was a lie. I guess - Gale ran off just like you did? Is he with you?"

"No," she said. "I didn't even know that he had left the District, not for sure. Last communication I had from him was actually here - he left me a token, which I thought meant he would be joining me. But he never did."

"When was that?"

"A couple weeks after I left."

He closed his eyes. "I'm trying to remember. There was the Reaping - and we were all taken up with the Games. No one could remember the last time they had seen him - just that, there was a huge blow-up at the Hob, not long after the search parties found your bloody dresses. He and Darius actually came to blows. Darius accused Gale and Gale said something about Darius stalking you, or something - at least, that's what people said; you know how these things get blown up out of proportion. Then, suddenly, Darius was arrested for the murder and sent off to the Capitol."

"Whoa," said Katniss. "On what proof? Gale was jealous of Darius, I guess, but Darius and I only ever talked at the Hob. He never followed me or had anything else to do with me."

"So - when Cray told Melly it was actually Gale, he said he had Darius accused instead, because Darius knew too much about him. I don't know what worse information Darius had on Cray than what Melly knew - unless it was something that could _really_ get him in trouble with the Capitol … I always thought that maybe he just said that to keep Melly in line - and by extension, me, I guess. He definitely didn't like my father. But - who knows for sure?"

A chill went up Katniss spine. She had always loathed Cray, known him to be corrupt in every way - but this was bone dead serious. She started to feel agitated for her mother and Haymitch, whom she had left in his general proximity. And Gale - what had Gale accidentally stumbled into?

"He needs to be stopped," she said, her voice colder and deeper than normal.

"I agree, but -."

Katniss closed her eyes and let her sudden rage burn silently within her. "They're coming," she said. "District Thirteen - and the Rebellion. They're just waiting …." She choked on her words and fell silent.

"District Thirteen? So - that's true? It still exists?"

She nodded. "What else do you know? Do you know about Snow?"

"That he's dying? Yeah, I've heard that, too. So? What will change?"

"Not enough," she said tightly. "Not enough. But they _have_ to succeed. Once Snow dies, they are coming to take Twelve, first - and from there, everything else. All the Districts - one by one."

"What? But - the people. In Twelve. They'll be caught in the crossfire - and for nothing. It's true - Snow's death _won't_ be enough. For the past five years, at least, he's been a propped-up figurehead, anyway. His son will take over, and put off a vote until everybody agrees not to vote - and nothing will change. Even in Twelve - how many people would actually join with a rebellion? Most of them will run and hide behind the Peacekeeper's guns - and, it's not that I don't wish it was different - but who could blame them? They've done nothing since the day they turned twelve years old to just desperately preserve their own lives."

She licked her lips and tasted him on them. Two fires warred within her. Here was this boy, suddenly igniting her with a desire to finally, finally give herself over to joy. To indulge the other fire would be to risk this. Because she would die, if she returned to Twelve to fight.

But that was what she _must_ do. Gale had been right. The Capitol's fingerprints had been on everything, manipulating their lives, controlling everything - Reaping or no Reaping.

"Don't you - of all people - want to kill Cray? Cray - and all of them?"

He swallowed. "If getting rid of Cray would have solved the problems in Twelve, I would have done it years ago, and damn the consequences. But Cray is a tiny cog in an entire …."

She stood up and paced around. "But you have to start - somewhere." When she looked back down at him, she found him staring intently at her. "Don't you?"

"Yes," he said softly. " _Yes_. If you can do it without sinking to their level. And without sacrificing people who have no say in the matter."

She caught her breath. "You said it, Peeta. The blood is already all over our hands. How much further have we to sink?"

"Then - we have to go back."

"Not we. Just me."

"Why? Why not me?"

"I just pieced you back together. I can keep you safe. You're not a fighter."

"Neither are they. Besides which - how do you even know? I may not have killed Cray, but I have certainly defied him. Do you know what happened to Gale's family after he left? Much the same as happened to your mother - abandonment, disgrace. One of the Hawthorne kids turned to theft and I took the punishment for him - he'd be dead, most likely, if I hadn't gone to the stocks for stealing bread from my own family. I may look broken to you - fragile - and maybe in some ways I am, but I am not a coward."

"But I _just_ found you."

"I know," he said. "And believe me, I wish it hadn't happened too late. But this isn't _your_ fight and I'm not letting you fight it alone."

"You're not strong enough," she pointed out. "Your leg is broken and you have just barely beat back infection. I felt the fever still on your lips."

"So give me a second before you march back into Twelve."

She stared down at him, wondering why she found every argument he made so compelling. She couldn't let him worm into her like that. Physical attraction, aside. He was right - it was too late for the rest. To become … fond of each other … was not an option. She needed to stay the course, and he couldn't stop her - but he didn't need to know that. "OK, OK. There's a cave - a little further up, in the hills. That was the second place we stayed, Prim and I. It's another day's journey from here, but the farther the better, and it's pretty well concealed. You can finish your recovery there."

It was also known to the rebels, this place, as was the concrete house by the lake. She had left them instructions on their maps - the signposts back to Twelve. She could leave Peeta there hidden and well-supplied with food, and they would find him there, if she never returned.

She kept her expression steady. "Are you ready to move?" she asked him.

"Yes," he said.

She helped him up and steadied him against her. He looked at her and she smiled and tilted up her face in an invitation. He blinked a couple of times, then bent shakily down to kiss her.

"I think I feel the fever on yours," he whispered.

"Yes," she said. "Oh - yes."


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven**

* * *

In your room  
Where time stands still  
Or moves at your will  
Will you let the morning come soon  
Or will you leave me lying here  
In your favourite darkness

\- Martin L. Gore "In Your Room"

* * *

"Well," said Melly, "I guess that's that, then."

Peeta stood over the bed, very still, and waited on the sound of the front door closing, gently, in the other room. Mrs. Everdeen's presence - the news she had brought - still lingered in the air. But Melly lifted her eyebrows into a wry expression that looked for all the world as if she had just lost a bet or something. "Oh, my god, Melly," he said. "I - I don't know what to say."

And that was true enough. What do you say to the woman who despises pity and mistrusts kindness?

"This is bad news for you, too, you know."

"What?! What do you mean?"

"When I die - some secrets will be only yours. And that's not a place you want to be."

Peeta shrugged. "I don't give a shit about Cray."

"You should. He doesn't like you."

"The feeling is mutual. If he comes for me, he comes. For his sake, he better be sure my back is to him, but anyway … it doesn't matter. Every day since I was Reaped is a bonus day I never deserved in the first place."

She groaned. "This again. And so, you allow yourself nothing - not even to love something - which supposedly is so important to you. Let alone enjoy anything."

He smiled at her. He wasn't going to get into a fight with someone who just found out she was dying, no matter how much she provoked him. "That's just my way. As yours … is yours."

At this - unexpectedly - a look of immense sorrow creased her face. He had never before seen a look like this - water actually pooled in the creases of her eyes.

"Do you think … do you think …." She swallowed. "It's always been there - this tumor - and that's - why I am the way I am?"

He didn't say anything, just reached over and hugged her. She rarely let him do this. And her tears were even rarer.

* * *

"How long did you and Prim stay here?" he asked Katniss.

"Year and a half. It was cold here and we decided not to do two winters."

"It's so dark."

"Yeah - Prim complained about that, too. The opening faces north, that's why. I don't know - it's roomy, well-hidden. The view outside is amazing."

"I'm not complaining. Just observing. And trying to imagine how it was for you."

She glanced over at him, pausing in the middle of a close inspection of every crack and seam in the small cave. It occurred to him that he had not had a good view of her face since they had left their last place in the woods, and he studied her expression now, trying to figure out … what? If what had transpired between them was real? If she was already starting to regret it? Things were happening so rapidly. It was just about this time last week that he was closing the door on his house (for the last time, perhaps), leaving behind his "wife" and the District on some quixotic quest that would have shown no meaningful success even if he _had_ found the herbs and returned safely.

And now, everything was inside out and upside down. The dead walked again and the girl he had always admired had kissed him. There was a world beyond the fences … and it was coming in, war and conflict again. And he was probably going to die in violence, instead of alone in his miserable little house. And he had kissed the girl who had been dead in the woods.

"What?" she asked him.

He shook his head. "Do I look as stunned as I feel?"

She chuckled lightly. "Something like that."

"Well, I am. Stunned. My whole life seems to have flipped over. And I'm worried. Worried about my family and - and everyone in Twelve, really, good or bad."

She sighed. "Me, too. The problem with that is … the problem is - how can I put it? Life doesn't stand still, forever, buffeting around you like a gentle breeze. It may stand still for a while - you may stand still with it, fooled into believing in the permanence of things. But - eventually the breeze gathers into a gale, and blows you away if you are not prepared for it. That's the problem with living a life of compliance and complacency. Going year to year thinking - 'I just need to get through this Reaping,' or 'I just need to survive in the mines one more day.' You are more startled by the storm because you've decided not to forecast the weather."

"I see what you're saying," he replied slowly. "And I understand why you might feel that way. But where you see complacency, I see survival - day by day, minute by minute - not fighting against the world, exactly, but scratching against it, bit by bit. It wears you down, I suppose. But it's not the same as being complacent. You need a great deal of stamina to survive the daily grind. You're asking people to turn around and fight who have always been denied weapons - even the right to have them."

" _I'm_ not asking anything …."

"You're asking people to be wise in a world that has always kept them in darkness. When the only possible truth in communication is either sedition or coded messages. I'm not trying to defend the indefensible, here - I'm just asking for some understanding - and patience."

"Why? Did you ever get any?"

"No - and I think it's exactly because of that - it's exactly because I was isolated and nearly alone - it's exactly because of that that I have become so sensitive to the need for it."

"Peeta, my agreement with you will not stop the storm. Is it really that important for you to have it?"

He cocked his head at her. "Well … yes."

"Why?"

He smiled. "I don't know."

She turned back to her investigation of the cave and eventually gave a delighted cry, pushing away some old leaves or something to reveal a curved piece of wood.

"Spare bow," she explained, turning to him. "If I recall, the notch end was broken so … yes, that's easily mended. It will be short for someone of your height, I guess, but - good for a beginner."

"You're going to teach me how to shoot?"

"I'm going to try."

* * *

After some experimenting, Peeta could lean his injured leg against a large boulder on the hillside and get just enough traction to be able to pull back the bowstring to full length. At targeting, however, he was very wide off the mark.

"But," said Katniss, encouragingly, after the third day of practice, "you can outdistance me by quite a lot. When you're at full strength, and you have a bit more practice with the way the arrow flies, you will be quite a shooter."

That night, she took off his shirt and rubbed his sore right shoulder until he told her that she needed to stop.

"Too hard?" she asked him.

"No," he swallowed. "Just right. Too right, Katniss."

With his back to her, in the darkness - he could still feel her blush. Her palm was against his shoulder and the place where her flesh and his flesh met was growing steadily warmer. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not - used to …."

He rolled over to face her. "Please don't apologize. I know it's too soon."

Too soon - and too late. As they had already established. She was going back to Twelve to die, and he was going to follow her. Unless ….

She bent down and kissed him. At first, he was frozen by surprise, but, just as she was about to pull away, he clasped her arms and responded. He wet her lips with his tongue, then opened them with a soft nudge of his own. Surprise was now shock - and a certain amount of terror, as well: it was not that he had not felt lust before - and of course he had indulged it - but this was different: infinitely more powerful and the ache was not just in the anticipated places, but also, and most keenly, in his heart. He was frightened of not giving in to it - of letting go this moment that his body was telling him that he deserved - and never getting this chance again. He was terrified of not being able to control it - of going too far, too fast, and running roughshod over this delicate thing - this delicate person. He wanted to belong to her in ways that he had never belonged to anyone before, and that meant soul as well as body.

He unlocked his lips from hers, lay his head back and stared at her. In the darkness she was unreadable, but there had certainly been nothing hesitant about her participation. He reached out to touch her shadowed expression with his finger, tracing the strong angles of her cheek and chin. "If I could spend the rest of my life," he said, "in this exact moment …."

He felt her smile. "Why not?" she said.

"You start to make me believe."

"Believe what?"

He shook his head. "In you."

"I'm here," she said. "I'm real."

"I'm not altogether sure."

She stretched herself out and laid herself down beside him. He bit his tongue on a groan. She reached out and repeated his own gesture, running her finger nail down his jawline. "How can I convince you?"

His breath caught, painfully. "Don't say things like that."

"Why not?" she countered, her voice cool and sure. "If nothing exists except for this moment, this space, right here and now … why not?"

He put his arms around her and kissed the top of her forehead, just at her hairline. Cautiously, softly, he added kisses down the side of her face. He felt her body tense against his (it reminded him of that last moment before letting the bowstring go, the last second of tension between suppression and release). "Why not?" he whispered against her hair.

For a moment they were suspended in silence, completely suspended in time. Then he felt her chest move with a deep and ragged breath. She put her mouth against his throat and every semblance of resolve melted away in him.

"Don't be scared," he said.

"I'm not scared," she answered. "I'm just … I feel … it feels like hunger, Peeta. If I'm afraid of anything, I'm afraid of hunger. Of needing … anything. Of depending on … anything."

This confession struck him speechless for a moment. He knew what she meant - hunger, both the physical craving and the intense emotional longing. "I know," he said, at last. "I know." Then she moved her body, lithe and quick, over his, and her hair fell over his face as she claimed his mouth - and those were the last conscious words he spoke for awhile.

* * *

In the morning, he woke up and she was gone.

He had more than half expected it. He actually smiled to himself as he sat up, then frowned and wondered if she was really gone or was just outside taking care of the morning chores. He imagined her walking distractedly through the trees, on the hunt - probably filled with regret. The usual consequence of pretending that … there are no consequences.

For himself - because he had known, or he had already suspected, there were no regrets. He had never woken up happier. It was an outsized emotion, completely uncontainable by his current circumstances, or by his old circumstances, or by the world in which they lived. It belonged to an alternate universe, one where love and sex - recreation and procreation - existed without terminal misery attached to them.

But even if terminal misery returned (as it would), he would always know. He would always now know what it was like to feel, for a moment, absolutely no want.

He sighed and struggled to his feet, grabbed his crutches and hobbled outside to wait for her to return. But she was right there, just sitting on a rock and idly twirling her knife in one of her hands while she watched the sky lighten.

He coughed.

She turned to him with a thoughtful expression. He resisted the temptation to ask her how she felt. That was her business; not his business. He had agreed to separate anything that had happened last night from everything else. One moment, frozen in time.

"How are you feeling?" she asked - again with that uncanny ability of hers to practically read his mind.

He suppressed a laugh. "Depends on what you mean. My leg is sore. I'm a bit hungry. I'm worried about Twelve. I'm terrified of Thirteen. And I've never felt better in my entire life." He paused. "And you? By which I mean … I'm not expecting last night to mean the same thing to you as it did to me. Just want to make sure you are … OK. And to let you know that nothing has to change."

"I'm OK," she replied, setting the knife down beside her, and turning her body slightly so that she faced him. "Peeta - if there was an option - to let everything change..."

He licked his lips. "Yeah - I know. I know."

And with that he had to be content - with her acknowledgement of the alternate universe, the one in which she might have loved him. And he _was_ content.

"I should go get breakfast," she sighed. She stood up, picking up her knife, then walked toward the cave - but stopped in front of him, biting her lip. "I'm not good with words," she said.

He didn't think that was precisely true - she seemed to have worked a fair bit of magic on him last night - but he held his tongue.

"It meant a lot to me. Not because it was the first time - I'm really not sentimental about those kind of things. Until last night, I didn't care whether it ever happened or not. It just felt good - it felt amazing - to be wanted. And it - it just felt good."

He closed his eyes, willing temptation away. She was so close to him, and it would be so easy, he felt, to say something - make some gesture - to restart everything again. "Thank you," he said. "It's good to hear."

"Peeta - look at me."

He opened his eyes and was surprised to see her dark gray eyes wet, as if with tears. "What?" he breathed.

"Nothing," she said, smiling as a tear slid down her cheek. She reached up and touched the top of his head, smoothing out his hair. Her fingers lingered at the base of his neck. "Back when we were kids - when you threw me that bread. Your mother hit you, didn't she? Because of me."

He withdrew from her - it was automatic at the mention of his mother, at the memory of the pain. "Yes," he said. "Why? Why do you ask?"

"Because it's all connected, isn't it? My life and your punishment. My leaving and your despair. Melly and her information. You being on hand the moment I came back. I'm finally starting to see - I finally understand. You can't ever really withdraw from the world. It's not possible. I don't believe in fate - I barely believe in coincidence. But I do believe in reading the signs when they are in front of me."

"What? Katniss, I don't think I understand."

"Like I said, I'm not good with words." She dug into her pocket and pulled out a small wooden token, which she held out to him on her palm, as if offering it to him. He frowned at it for a moment before taking it with a gasp.

"I know this - I've seen this."

"You have?"

"Madge - she has a pin like this. She wears it on official occasions, like the Reaping."

"That fits some things that people have told me. Snow's death is not enough. The people need inspiration. They need to know that they are not alone - that there is a rebellion behind them, that it never really went away. And they need to see that someone is willing to sacrifice - themselves - for the cause. The mockingjay - what is special about the mockingjay, Peeta?"

"Besides the fact that it can mimic any song it hears? I don't know - I guess - well, it exists, really - that's what is so special about it. The Capitol corrupted the natural bird into the jabberjay, supposedly past the ability of reproduction. Yet, it managed to not only reproduce, but to produce something - new."

"Yes. We need the people to see that - that the Capitol may have won the war, but they did not fundamentally change us. We need to be free - we need to be free to fly, to sing, to father children who are free."

"Why must _you_ be the sacrifice?"

She smiled. "Well, I won't be if I can possibly help it, but don't you see? It's because I left - I walked away. As far as they know, I am dead. When I come back, I bring not only news - not only _information_ \- but hope. _Proof_."

* * *

Hope. Proof. The words lingered in his brain long after she left to hunt. He couldn't concentrate on shooting, he was too distracted - equally by the memories of the night before and the fears of what lay ahead. He walked down the hillside a bit - it was a chore with the crutches, he almost had to walk sideways - then stopped at a cluster of wildflowers to pick some white-crowned stems. Then he stopped himself, feeling like he was probably being self-centered. As if flowers could persuade her to change her course, to stay with him.

Hope. Proof.

Time to pick a lane, Mellark, he thought to himself. He had had a lifetime of practice, at that, setting aside distractions in service of whatever was the right thing to do. Bread for Katniss. A ring for Melly. The only real injustice - the one he couldn't get over - was what happened to his brother. And that was almost certainly on Cray - a growing realization over the years, one he had been trying to ignore.

 _I don't give a shit about Cray._

He looked down at his fingers - tried to count the days since he had been home. When was the Reaping? Should be soon, now - it was late June when he left, it was now at least a week into July.

 _When I'm dead …._

Melly's voice whispered through the flowers.

 _When I'm dead, remember there are some things hidden in the boxcar. Cray might suspect. You should get to them first. For protection._

 _Proof_. He wondered: what is the most damaging thing that Melly knew about Cray? Was it the rigged Reapings? If Cray was publicly accused - with proof - on a live, televised broadcast - would that be enough? To get rid of him; to stir the crowd - to prep Twelve to welcome the revolution? Or - if the Peacekeepers knew that one of their own had been falsely accused of murder - could even they be persuaded against Cray and Theoph - and even the Capitol?

They couldn't wait for his leg. They needed to be back in Twelve - within the week. Somehow - somehow ….

As he straightened up, scattering the wildflowers, he was startled by the sharp sound of a bird calling out in the valley below him. He watched it flutter hastily out of the trees - only to be replaced, suddenly, by the dark, bulky shape of a Capitol hovercraft. Peeta's heart started to race - he didn't know which direction she had gone, but if they found her… disaster.

He watched it land, disappearing behind a fold in the hills. He fought his gasping breath and his lame leg to hurtle himself downhill. There was no way to warn her - no way to know if she needed to be warned. There was only one thing he could do. He begin to shout _help_ , _help!_

* * *

Peeta steadied himself as the hovercraft jolted up, a strange sensation. He felt them staring - and no wonder. He was shirtless, his jeans in pieces, a couple weeks' extra growth on his head and chin. And he was miles from home.

"Peeta, what on earth are you doing out here?"

He looked up - he was on good terms with most of the Peacekeepers (although some of those who had grabbed him were none he knew). "Denny … it's a long story. I went looking for some herbs - for Melly. Then I injured my leg - I was a bit confused - I got turned around and lost my way and ended up ... here."

"Is that why you broke into the mayor's house? To get medicine for Melly?"

Peeta hesitated. Would it do any good to lay claim to Katniss' crime if there were witnesses who had seen a dark-haired girl beat them to the fence? Especially since Cray would know better. But it couldn't hurt to sow confusion. "I - yes," he said. "I was desperate."

"I hate to see you in this much trouble, Peeta, but - whooo, boy. It's chaos back home. And I hate to have to tell you this, but …."

Peeta could tell by his tone. He had been expecting it - he had been anticipating it. He had closed his eyes to the guilty conscience - knowing Melly would have laughed at him for it, anyway - that had pricked him, gently, this morning. He had considered himself free because he was not only a faux-husband but probably a faux-widower, by now. Yet, still it hurt, waiting to hear the words. "She's gone, isn't she?"

"Died last night, Peeta. I'm sorry."

* * *

A/N: Sorry for the long delay. I had gallstones - which was four days intense pain followed by almost three weeks of awesome discomfort. I highly do not recommend.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve**

* * *

Upon the sodden ground

His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,

Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;

While his bow'd head seem'd list'ning to the Earth,

His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.

\- John Keats. "Hyperion"

* * *

When the light broke across his face, Peeta didn't even bother to look up. He knew who his visitor was.

"So, here we are," said Cray.

"My condolences," Peeta replied.

There was a sharp pause. For all of Cray's weaknesses and inconsistencies, _this_ was his most vulnerable spot. His fondness for Meliora - his one decent quality, in Peeta's estimation - was a source of near-humiliation for him. And Peeta knew that, among the several reasons that Cray did not like him, one of the most persistent was that Cray was _jealous_ of him, suspicious of the little time that he and Melly had spent together. It took very little to goad him - at least for Peeta.

But that time was running out, he reminded himself.

He felt no fear. He had wondered if he would. And he didn't. This was more than compensation for the fact that he was about to die. This felt like the salvation of his life. This felt like everything he had thought was empty about him had actually been full all along. Strength. Courage. He had only needed to see it.

Proof. Hope.

"And mine," Cray finally said. "She was your only defender here."

Peeta laughed. "Maybe. Maybe not. But for sure she was yours."

Cray stepped closer, touched the bars of Peeta's cell, and grimaced. "I just wish I could finish it now. A public hanging - it would serve so many useful purposes."

"Why don't you?"

"Everyone is accounted for. Everyone. So - who robbed the mayor? Who escaped through the fence? Haymitch said 'cut the power' so he could get you back in and no one the wiser that I turned a blind eye to you leaving. But it wasn't for you, was it? And we're too close to the Reaping to get rid of Haymitch - or to use the more interesting ways to make him talk."

"I don't know what you're talking about. I was injured and lost when the mayor's house was robbed."

"You were treated with medications and your leg was set. Someone did that. Someone I can't account for. Someone in cahoots with Haymitch - as are you. You told him, didn't you, about Darius? You'll come to regret that choice."

Peeta snorted. "I've never spoken to Haymitch in my entire life." He looked down at his fingers and calculated, quickly. So - _Katniss_ was now his leverage with Cray. Her reappearance could be very inconvenient for him. But Katniss must be protected. Her return to the district must be on her terms, in whatever fashion she planned. So - how long could he walk this line …?

"There are ways of getting people to talk."

"No need to get all dark and mysterious about it. I'm talking. Listen to me talk."

"I know that you know what is going on here."

Peeta licked his lips. "I know that I'm tired, sore, hungry - and sad, incredibly sad. Tell me - are you going to bury her? I don't have much, but I wouldn't want to see her go to the paupers' field."

"Your mother sent the undertaker yesterday."

"My _mother_?"

Cray shrugged.

"Can I see my mother?"

"If she asks."

"Fair enough." Peeta sighed. "Look, I know you dislike me. I know you've wanted to see me dead since - at least since I was 16 years old. And that's fine. Do it - finally, do it. Melly was my friend and I cared for her. I left the District to get her some herbs to ease her passing. I was injured. I was lost. Your peacekeepers found me. They don't know who they were looking for. So - why does it matter if they think it is me? You've never had a problem using - scapegoats."

"Hassel is in a coma after hitting the fence - we had to ship him back to District Two. Gray and Galvis didn't see you - they saw someone else. And you look a mess, but you certainly haven't been shot in the face."

"People can be convinced that they saw anything. You know that."

"But not Theoph - not the Capitol. A Peacekeeper was fucking wounded out here in Twelve. How long do you think we have before we are swarmed by soldiers and investigators from the Capitol?"

"Ahh," said Peeta. "Do - you expect me to care what happens to Peacekeepers? Peacekeepers have murdered citizens of District 12 - young, innocent girls."

Cray licked his lips - so, thought Peeta, he _does_ suspect. He suspects who it is. No bodies were found. The only confession was false. The only suspect was fake. A dark haired girl, a huntress in the wild - well known to Cray, who, like the other Peacekeepers, had bought food from the girl, illegal though it was. Cray must have always wondered what had really happened to her.

Now, I have to hide the fact that he is right. Hide it with my life.

"One last chance," said Cray. "Who is she - and where?"

Peeta shook his head. "I guess we're going to have to test those ways of yours."

"I guess we are," rasped the other man.

Peeta spent the night wondering what Cray had at his disposal - torture-wise. By himself, in the dim cell, alone in the darkness, he could not be flippant about it. Torture must exist because it was, at least in some instances, effective. He must find a way to guard against it. To come up with layers of different stories to tell, so that when he had to talk, he could lie convincingly. And then again - and again.

* * *

His visitor that morning was Haymitch.

Peeta knew him, of course. Every year, like clockwork, Haymitch climbed drunkenly up the stage and faced the crowd at the Reaping. But, in fact, they _had_ never spoken and Peeta couldn't think of a reason why Haymitch would know who he was - unless he remembered that one day their paths had, briefly, crossed. Haymitch didn't partake in regular community life, keeping to himself in his big house, venturing out mostly for booze. When he had been younger, Peeta had somewhat vaguely despised him - between the dead tributes and the parties in the Capitol, there was not much to like. But in later years, he had come to think of Haymitch as, like himself, one of the discarded souls of District Twelve. He wondered what business Katniss had had with him - they hadn't had much time to talk about it. Presumably, something to do with the plans brewing in Thirteen.

"So, this is the infamous Peeta Mellark," said Haymitch, scowling at him.

"Infamous?"

"Thief, runaway … spy? Folk hero, anyway."

"Folk hero?"

"Not many would defy the Peacekeepers and the fences for love - for a dying wife."

Peeta rolled his eyes. "No one could possibly be sentimental about me and Melly."

"Not before. But now … well - people crave sentiment. They're _dying_ for it."

"Huh." Peeta stared into Haymitch's watery gray eyes. "Well. That wasn't my purpose, but - OK."

"Do you know why I'm here?" asked Haymitch.

"Oh, yes," Peeta smiled. "Cray thinks we have some plot going on and he's hoping we talk about it - while he listens in."

Haymitch laughed. "Yes." After a pause, he added: "I'll be real honest with you; I forgot the baker even had a third son."

Peeta's mouth twisted. "It was my brother you would have known."

"Yes."

"So - you haven't forgotten." Peeta's voice shook despite himself. "I mean - it wasn't for long."

All the lines in Haymitch's face suddenly deepened. "I haven't figured that part out, yet. Forgetting."

Peeta realized that his hands were gripping the cell doors so tightly that his knuckles were bloodless. He unclenched his fingers. "I'm - sorry."

Haymitch frowned. "Sorry for what?"

"Sorry for what they've done to you. Sorry that no one lived - to take your place."

"Keep your damn pity. I don't need it," Haymitch replied gruffly. "So ... now what?"

Peeta sighed. What, indeed? There was information he needed Haymitch to have, and no way of getting it to him without risking being overheard. "The only thing I'm worried about right now," he said, slowly, "is - the arrangement for my wife, for her funeral. Perhaps I can make you a list - to give to my mother."

Haymitch stared at him - understanding, Peeta thought. It was a long shot. Anything written down could also be intercepted by Cray. But it was too important not to try. It might be too late to get Haymitch to collect whatever Melly had left behind; but Haymitch should be warned, somehow, that Katniss was on her way back to Twelve - sooner, perhaps, rather than later.

"Do you want to see her?"

Peeta swallowed. Actually - he kind of did. He was about to die and before that he was about to get pretty messed up. But more important than seeing her and getting closure, one way or another - was saving her. "What I want to see," he said, "is the mockingjay. Again."

Haymitch raised his eyebrows. "Fond of birds are you?"

"Yeah. Some more than others."

"What is it about the mockingjay?"

Peeta shrugged. "I don't know. I guess it's just the fact that they exist, when they really weren't supposed to in the first place. And that they keep coming back. To sing your song back to you."

"I don't know. They tend to clutter the air a little too soon after being shooed off."

"Yes - sometimes they come back too soon."

Peeta and Haymitch stared at each other for a moment. The conversation was becoming so warped and strange that surely Cray would understand that they were speaking in code, but what, if anything, he would understand …? Peeta wasn't sure. Anyway, it was the best he could do in the circumstances.

* * *

On his third day in prison, Peeta had a third visitor. His mother.

She was staring at his face, which now was covered in bruises and welts - and he could not resist making the obvious joke.

"Makes our house look like amateur hour, doesn't it?" He asked. Then he winced. His jaw hurt like hell.

"Why do you keep doing this shit?" she hissed at him.

He wondered to what scope she was referring. Was it just his last couple of times in the stocks - the public humiliation of having a son - wayward though he be - chained up in the square? Was it his marriage to the prostitute? His moving to the Seam? Did it go all the way back to his illness that summer of the Reaping? Did it go back even farther - to the fact that he had liked drawing instead of wrestling? Did it go all the way back to the bread?

"I don't know," he sighed. "I just never learned to settle right, Mom," he added - an answer that covered all of it.

"Thank god your father isn't alive to see this. If there was any small thing he was grateful for over the last years of his life, it was that at least you were spared - you were alive. You were his favorite - why, I never really knew."

Peeta tried to smile. "Me neither. How's Will?"

"Doing his job - running the bakery. It's a tough job - just the two of us."

"Give him my best - my love. I know I'll never see him again."

"Whose fault is that?"

"Mom," he said. "I'm not a thief. No matter what happened in the past - no matter what they say now. I never stole anything, not once - ever - in my life."

She squinted at him. "Then why do you keep confessing to it?"

"Things are bigger than me - they've always been bigger than me, actually. But now …. Listen, we don't have much time. They told me you buried Meliora. Thank you - I can't thank you enough. I don't know why you did it, but …."

"She carried our name. Anyway - everyone is so upset about it all. They're angry - they want you released - they think you loved this girl so much that you put your life on the line for her. There would be pitchforks if we let her be put in the paupers' field."

Peeta hesitated. This was the second account of this extraordinary consequence, and from his mother he most definitely had to believe it. He supposed he should try to find a way to make use of this situation, as it must be driving Cray right out of his mind - but he naturally shied away from hypocrisy and especially since all he would really be doing was using one girl for the sake of saving the life of the one he really loved. There are limits.

"Thank you - thank you, Mom," was all he said. "Listen, uh - I don't have much time left, so for my own funeral arrangements, just make sure that you put the mockingjay symbol on my stone. OK?"

She drew in a sharp breath and her eyes glinted at him, narrow and hard. "Mockingjay," she repeated.

"Yes - you remember how devoted I am to them."

She licked her thin lips and he tried not to act as surprised as he felt. He meant only to leave her a clue, for later - that if the mockingjay returned as a symbol for the new rebellion, that she would be mindful to follow it. But she seemed aware of its significance already and he wondered: _how many knew_?

"Yes," she said. "I remember - I'll make sure."

* * *

Peeta watched the clear liquid on its path down the needle, through the tube; watched it disappear into the middle vein of his left hand.

"What is it?" he asked thickly.

"Quiet," said Cray.

"You might as well tell me, since it's in already." Peeta blinked as the tiles on the floor below him started to quiver uncertainly.

This was so strange and out of context. He had been moved to an office in the Peacekeeper barracks - a place he had never been, except to pick up Melly once or twice from the wing where Cray's residence was. Cray's office was every bit as elegant as the mayor's office - some kind of stone flooring, shiny wooden desks and shelves, thick velvet curtains. Peeta was attached to a chair with plastic ties around his forearms and ankles. Cray sat opposite him. At his left side, a small metal tray with tubes and vials - behind him, someone unfamiliar; perhaps in from the Capitol - he had attached the tubes and administered the dose of ... whatever it was.

He licked his lips as a metallic taste crept across his tongue. The dizzy feeling intensified into a headache.

Behind him, a television set was on and someone was droning in the background - Capitol news, Capitol accents - vapid and vacant.

His skin started to tingle, and every bruise Cray's goons had administered over the last two days started to throb in renewed pain. "What?" he asked.

"You'll talk when you're told to talk." Cray's voice, buzzing like a bee, the words darting in and out of comprehension. "And no more of your obvious lies."

Peeta's eyes seemed ratcheted wide open as some kind of nameless fear hit him, suddenly, right in the chest. He could see _Darius_ \- as if Darius stood right across from him, right behind Cray - and he was holding up the bloody, tattered dress.

No. This was his secret - the one he had kept hidden for so many years, long years where it didn't even matter. And now that it did - now that her name on his lips could do so much damage - it was as if it was being forced out of him. He swallowed hard on it, but still a voice was speaking. It just took awhile for him to realize that it wasn't his.

"Was it yours?" hissed Cray.

"What?" asked Peeta again, and the word seemed to elongate and stretch out thin, so that it was no longer his voice but the voice of the clear poison that was filling him.

"The baby."

Peeta squinted, looking away from Darius and back toward Cray (though he couldn't really see him - just a shining, hunched human figure). More blood. Blood all over the sheets. _When I die_ …. "No," said Peeta.

"Did you fuck her?"

Peeta laughed. It occurred to him that he was probably not hearing whatever Cray was actually saying - that these questions were flying around the room, lighting on the lamp or the bookshelf, changing, warping, before he heard the words. There was only one _her_. He recalled her body - pressed, squeezed against his - the arch of her back, how strong and natural it was. He could almost feel the notches of her spine, still, against his fingertips. And how everything had been all sensations at once, contradictory and complementary - rough and smooth, wet and dry. Fast and slow. Hard and soft. One moment in time, frozen, cut off from everything else.

"No," he said.

"You're lying. How is he lying?"

"I don't know, I -."

"No," said Peeta, his voice strange, almost song-like. "I never did. I never did." Then he laughed again. "Of course I am," he told Cray. "What else you got?"

* * *

Peeta woke in the darkness, face down on the floor of his cell. He ached - every inch of skin. He felt bone-bruised and hollowed out. His mouth tasted like dust. His head throbbed right behind his eyes.

"My wife is very upset," someone whispered.

"It will take more doses - perhaps many more. Tracker jacker venom is usually used to enhance brainwashing - used in isolation it's not quite as efficient in getting the truth. The subject has to be broken - he has to lose his desire to protect his secrets; he has to turn on the thing he is protecting."

A third voice - Cray: "We're running out of time."

The first voice - it was Theoph, Peeta realized, waking up abruptly out of the haze - answered: "We're _out_ of time. The Capitol is watching - and it is coming. We need a culprit or a cover-up, and fast. I suggest you pick one of your less-connected girls, Cray."

"No," said Peeta.

"It wakes," said Theoph, coolly. "Mellark, you had it so easy - alone, forgotten - a little trouble here and there, nothing big. But rebels run in your family and I guess that's just a stain that never goes away. You're not the last of your kind, you know. Panem would be well rid of your family, altogether, and I can guarantee it if you don't talk."

Peeta struggled to get up - made it as far as sitting on his crushed tailbone - and peered through the dim lighting at the three men outside his cell. A disgust for his situation - a disgust for his life, the way he had been living it up until a few days ago - filled him completely. His final act would be to deny these fuckers any satisfaction; and that would be enough. "I've already told you everything."

"Who is the girl?"

"What girl? You mean this person who nobody saw clearly, who is on nobody's ledgers? Even if she does exist - and I'm sure you're making things up just to throw me - it's a big world out there; just because two people aren't in District 12 at the same time doesn't mean they actually know each other."

Theoph came up to the bars and looked down at him, shaking his head. "Do you think I've never heard lies before? I hear them every damn day."

"Me, too," returned Peeta. "I've lived them every damn day. What even is the truth? Do any of us know?"

"God, what a ridiculous little asshole he is," said Theoph to Cray.

"Why is Madge upset?" asked Peeta.

"One more day of torture," said Theoph, ignoring him. "Have your fun. Then he's executed tomorrow, no matter what he says today. After the Reaping, we close the bakery."

Peeta swallowed, but resisted the objection, which would only be giving them what they wanted. More immediately, the thought of Cray given full, unrestrained, control over his body was terrifying. He wondered if -.

The room lit up suddenly, crossing over his thoughts with the suddenness of the glare - a pulsating bright light, followed by the claxon sound - the call of the Capitol. The bright light came from the flashing of a television screen as it switched on - so flat against the far wall, Peeta had never even noticed it, but of course they were everywhere, listening and watching when they were not being watched. Mandatory programming.

And a familiar sight: a podium set up on the steps of the President's Mansion in the Capitol. The man who stepped up to it was gray-haired, short, round-bellied. He had kept in the background for most of Peeta's life, living it up behind the scenes, but over the last couple of years had become a staple on television, slowly replacing his father: Attius Snow.

Peeta's mind raced. It was very early morning in the Capitol - still dark. This was it. It _had_ to be it.

"My beloved fellow citizens of Panem," began the man. He was very different from his father in presentation. President Snow had commanded his audiences with his slow, careful enunciation, dripping with careful intonations so that his words and their meanings were rarely the same - his most benign statements could elicit horror. Attius was ... melodramatic. His speeches were punctuated by the phoniest eye-rolling, face-scrunching, loud-sighing accompaniments that Peeta had ever witnessed. His voice now was actually trembling with an emotion that got lost in the coldness of his pale blue eyes. "This morning I bring you the news that I have long dreaded to bring. Today, after seventy-six years as the most successful leader this nation - or her predecessors - has ever known, my father, Coriolanus Snow, breathed his last."

"Oh, shit," said someone.

Peeta was silent, incapable of speech. His heart was pounding so loudly that he worried he might miss the rest of the broadcast. Layers upon layers of emotion. Fear - a primal fear. All his life one man - one regime - had been in charge of his country and his life. There was terror in the unknown. Joy - deep and also primal. That, no matter what happened next, an evil had departed, forever. He was glad that he had lived to see the moment.

And fear again - because he knew what was coming next.

"My father had been hoping to preside over one last Hunger Games, an event he helped found and over all of which he presided as either Gamemaker or President." At this, Attius bit his lip and shook his head, as if warding off tears - but still his eyes were brittle and dry. "I have been told that, in ancient times, the death of a ruler might mean a suspension of such games, while the country mourned. But …" another dramatic pause. "But … what greater tribute to President Snow have we but to go on with the Games, and in his honor?"

Attius looked up then to acknowledge the sound of a cheering crowd. Then he held up his hand. "However - after consulting with the Gamemakers, we have decided to make an unprecedented change to the rules. This year, to mark another ancient tradition upon the passing of a ruler, we are calling for all the districts to release their prisoners. In place of the children of the district, these prisoners will comprise next week's Reaping pool. Those chosen will compete in the arena and the winner fully pardoned. Those not chosen will have their sentences commuted."

The stunned silence on TV was mirrored in the dark cell. Then Peeta laughed.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen**

* * *

Watch for Selene overhead, with her head shining brightly, bearing

A crescent moon that reaches from her forehead to

Your heart ...

\- "Selene Awakens." Christy Birmingham

* * *

"Peeta Mellark!"

His mother's voice, sharp and frustrated (nothing new there). Peeta groaned and sat up in bed. There was always a moment, at first waking, when the world was normal. Then recollection kicked in and his arms started trembling.

He groaned as he pushed himself out of bed. He had not been able to eat - the collapse had been that thorough. He had vomited everything he had tried to get down and, because his fever had been basically non-existent, at first the healer thought hangover or food poisoning. It did feel a little like each. But the illness had persisted over nearly two weeks, wiping out the end of the school year (there were make-up tests to take and he would never take them). It was baffling - but then, so were most illnesses. In District Twelve, there were no real doctors, no real medications, no X-Rays. Blood test results took months to come back from the Capitol - if you could even afford them. There was nothing but rudimentary observation, and maybe an autopsy once you were gone. _Wasting disease_ they called it - it covered everything from starvation to cancer.

They couldn't call in Mrs. Everdeen, who had a better knack than the townie druggist (a cousin of hers, or something) - because she was going through her own trials. It would have been a last resort on Mrs. Mellark's part, anyway. And Peeta would have been mortified to see her - mortified and also tempted to confess the real reason for his illness: his intense - his physical - despair over the death of her daughter.

Over the last couple of days, his body had started to betray him, to physically crave food again. He had had soup and bread yesterday and kept it down. He wondered what kind of person he was, to get over his grief so quickly. He would have welcomed death - because what the hell did he have to live for, anyway? But it had only flirted with him and moved on.

Yet, at the breakfast table, he could still only pick at his food. Reaping day breakfast was much larger than normal - in addition to the usual cinnamon bread and porridge, they splurged on eggs - and there were oranges for Peeta and his next-older brother, a just-in-case indulgence for the boys who might not return tonight (though this was kind of silly, Peeta thought, since if one was Reaped, indulgence by the Capitol was the name of the game - at least until the real game began). The eggs tasted like dust to him, and the orange was so acidic it gave him heartburn.

"How are you doing today?" his father asked quietly from one end of the table.

Peeta looked up and squinted - the top of his head felt heavy and it made his eyes a little blurry. He was mad at himself - irrationally, sometimes for two opposing reasons at once: for caring too much, for caring too little - and his anger was attempting to transfer (also irrationally) to his father, whose nature he had inherited so closely it was almost laughable. He really wished, for once in his life, that he had inherited his mother's unsentimental nature.

"I - I think I can make it to the square and back," he said, shakily. On any other day, they all would have laughed - the town square was literally right outside their front door. But it was a sober day.

Later, up in their room, he and his brother dressed in their Reaping day clothes, Peeta very slowly.

"You look green," he was told.

"I'll manage," he replied, shortly. He didn't mean to be rude, but when you are the youngest of three brothers, you learn to defend yourself against implications of weakness. It becomes automatic.

"Dude, are you dying?"

Peeta sat down on his bed. The mushy mattress springs sagged beneath him. He tried to smile. "Not today."

There was more of that when he made his way out to the square and shuffled through the check-in and made his place in line. Everyone was startled by his appearance - sympathetic and clearly worried. His muscles were starting to shake and he wondered how on earth he was going to keep himself up for the hour or whatever it would take to get the Reaping over with. He wondered how the Seam kids did it - go without food for as long as some of them did. He felt so weak.

And of course - even more painfully - everyone was still buzzing about the Everdeen deaths. Gale Hawthorne was already there, standing right in front of the stage that had been erected in front of the Justice Building, tall and aloof as people kept trying to talk to him about it. There was something odd and stilted about his demeanor (at least from what Peeta could tell with just his back in view) - but everyone grieves in his own way, perhaps.

"Did you hear," someone said, "Mrs. Everdeen was arrested? For letting the girls leave the fence …."

Peeta frowned at that. They _all_ had known. No one had _ever_ tried to stop it. They had _all_ benefited.

But eventually, the crowd stilled as Effie Trinket arrived and the Reaping began. Effie, of course, had no idea that the District had been upended by an unusual pair of deaths - and what would the Capitol care, anyway? So many are lost to starvation every year that the rolls of participating children probably decreased every year, rather than otherwise. We're all dying, he thought angrily.

He frowned up at the stage, not listening to the speeches and recitations - not that he ever did, anyway - his ears filled instead with a dull and buzzing anger, a helpless rage. The need to go into the woods for food was, after all, created by the Capitol. Their bloody hands were on everything ….

Some girl was called up to the stage. She was from the Seam and she came up from several rows behind him, so she was thirteen or fourteen. He vaguely recognized the name, but didn't know her. Haymitch stirred restlessly, got up from his seat on the stage and started to stagger away before remembering that it wasn't over with - the Mayor grabbed his arm and yanked him back into place, while Effie - frowning and furious - tapped her foot, then asked for volunteers. She was greeted by the silence of the crowd. Deathly silent, as if even an under-the-breath cough might be mistaken for assent. So it went - so it always went.

"Peeta Mellark!"

Peeta's head jerked up at the sound of his name. He had missed Effie's movement to the boys' bowl. Wait - what? The crowd gasping echoed his own internal startlement. It was rare - extremely rare - for a Merchant to be reaped. He had so few - comparatively - slips in that bowl. Five. Not the dozens that some kids had. Five.

Then the crowd around him started to step back. Surprise or not - he was Reaped, so he must go. They certainly weren't going to go. He must go. He stepped - slowly and unsurely - up and through the crowd of teenagers. Up to the steps. He felt a hand brush his back on the way, but did not turn toward the gesture. He concentrated on Effie's impatient smile. On the Seam girl's frightened expression. Then he turned around and stared back out at the crowd - at the kids gaping up at him. The adults ringing the outside of the square. He tried to find his parents' faces in the mix, but his eyes weren't working properly.

Then, as the shock started to recede, illumination struck him. Fate had somehow tied him to the girl he had loved, after all. He was following her into the darkness of a violent death. He felt himself actually smile. And then -.

"I volunteer," a thin voice just below him. "I volunteer as tribute."

Then he heard his mother scream.

* * *

When he was brought out with the other prisoners - a few drunks, some people who owed fines and a half dozen people who had been swept up in the crackdown following the break-in at the Mayor's, mostly for possession of banned goods - he was struck by the circular nature of things, even though the circumstances of this Reaping were so different.

His appearance once again caused a stir - his leg in a cast, his face bruised, his nose broken. It was then that the murmurs started; unhappy, more vocal than usual.

Peacekeepers lined the stage. Cray and Theoph flanked the Mayor, Haymitch, Effie - and Madge. Madge was swollen, in the late stages of pregnancy - and she did look fairly miserable. He looked for the pin on her breast and saw it - the mockingjay. He felt himself smile. And he wondered - where Katniss was, now; if she was wondering where he was. God, he'd like to see her again.

And here was Effie again, stepping up to the microphone, taking the stage - so heavily made up these days, wearing gloves to hide the tell-tale aging of her hands. It was a sweltering summer day - she must be miserable, he thought, almost bemusedly. But her cheerful voice, bringing the doom from the Capitol, sounded exactly the same as ever.

The other prisoners around him looked lined and worried - how awful for them, he thought, having escaped the Reaping in their childhoods, only to end up here, again. He wanted to comfort them - at least the other men. There was no way his name had not - for the second time in his life - been somehow rigged for the choosing.

The one female prisoner was one of Cray's girls - another one with a little too much knowledge of secrets? - and her he could not help, unfortunately. Effie called her up with a shrug in her voice and she stepped up, stoically. Perhaps she could see the benefit of finally leaving behind her desperate life in Twelve? Reapings are wasted on the young, he thought ironically - it's only us tired, worn-down, ground-down adults who can see the benefit of death. And me, especially. This has been such a long time in coming.

 _Peeta Mellark_.

He climbed up the stage, throwing a grin to Cray as he did. He was almost as feeble a walker as he had been on that summer day ten years ago. But at least this time he had no cause for shame. And this time, there would be no volunteer to replace him.

He glanced at Haymitch who was actually sober for today's Reaping - for the first time possibly. He winked at Peeta, a gesture that was impossible to interpret. Then Peeta turned back to the crowd and smiled. Someone in the crowd cried out " _no_ ," and he didn't recognize the voice, but he waved gratefully.

Effie shook her head and tapped the microphone. "Do we have any volunteers for Peeta Mel-"

"Ahem," Peeta cleared his throat. "No - no volunteers," he said, leaning over so that the microphone could catch his voice. He liked the way it bounced over the stone and brick. "These wonderful people," he added, "have done enough - helping to mourn my lovely wife…."

It was a test of what he had been told about the District's current mood - and it was effective. The unhappy murmuring in the crowd swelled suddenly, his name called out several times.

Effie attempted to yank the microphone away, but he was swifter and grabbed it first. "Please, please - remember her the way she was when she was a child - orphaned and innocent - and not what she became, abused by our Head Peacekeeper, like so many of your daughters. She was -."

He felt hands on him, yanking him back. Cray, no doubt. Effie squealed and several people shouted. And then they screamed. Cray fell backward, and Peeta almost stumbled backward over him. When he got his bearings straight, he looked down in amazement - and then his eyes went up - searching, desperately searching. Cray was dead, an arrow in his throat.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter Fourteen**

"But give me to be Bringer of Light and give me to gird me in a tunic with embroidered border reaching to the knee, _that I may slay wild beasts_."

Callimachus, Hymn to Artemis

* * *

Katniss kept having to suppress the urge to whistle. Bad for the hiding - worse for the hunt. So she just puckered her lips and occasionally blew out a silent tune.

Heba kept close to her, almost hugging her shin as they crept slowly between trees, Katniss eyeing the ground for any sign of tracks - deer, rabbit, even game bird.

At one point she stood up, frustrated in her quest - but unable to _feel_ the frustration. The ridiculous smile on her face: that's what she felt - and she knew her concentration was shot. All she really wanted to do was go back to the cave and try it all again - his mouth on her skin, and his body above, beneath, beside her. It shouldn't matter - why should it matter? What was the point? Yet - it was all she could think about right now.

"I'm in trouble," she whispered to the dog.

Indeed. How had he managed to worm his way - so rapidly and thoroughly - into her heart and her conscience, both? Still - she had one way to achieve the upper hand. She could keep him safe, as had been her plan, anyway - leave him and - possibly - return to him. She just needed to make plans. Layers and layers of plans. And for that she must concentrate.

Heba growled, a low warning sound from deep in her throat. Katniss straightened, startled, and looked around. That meant a predator, normally - though she could hear and see nothing. But she trusted Heba's senses much more than her own. Without even thinking about it, she jumped over to the nearest tree and started scaling it. Up, up - well above a normal man's eyeline, and then further up.

She stood up on a branch - any further and she'd have to worry about it bearing her weight - and, clutching the bole, peered around. She could see the sky and, beyond the tree branches, the hills where the cave was. There was no movement.

Then, suddenly, there was a darkening of the sky and - oh, she should have known, animals could always sense them before they appeared - a hovercraft descended, low in the sky. This was the second time she had seen one live, and she had forgotten just how intimidating was the appearance - the sudden darkness, the loud mechanical sound.

It was some distance from her - landing in a bare spot outside the trees, at the base of the hills. Closer to the cave. Shit ….

She slid down the tree. "Stay," she commanded the dog - Heba whined unhappily but did not follow her - and she sprinted desperately through the trees. Shit. If they were landing so specifically near the cave, they must have sensed somehow their presence; they would quickly enough pinpoint the cave, and Peeta would be pinned down there (his only flight option was downhill in their direction - or up, but above the cave the hills steepened and were nearly inaccessible even for people without broken legs).

She wondered how many Peacekeepers would be in the craft. Less than seven, she might have a chance if she could take them by surprise ….

But as she burst out of the trees, the hovercraft was already ascending again, climbing up into the sky. Already? Surely they had not found him so quickly. Maybe they were just making some quick surveys of the area … or maybe they had just dropped some Peacekeepers off to scour the hills.

Cursing her uncertainty, she walked slowly and cautiously back up the hills, now biting down her temptation to scream out his name and make sure that he was all right. Hopefully - surely - she would find him hiding sensibly in the cave, keeping quiet himself.

There was no sign of him - nor of any Peacekeepers, either. He had left his bow propped against the rock. She followed the heavy trail of his footprints - he was very easy to track. He had gone downhill - stopped in a clump of wildflowers (she picked up the ones he had let loose, her heart growing cold) - then continued on, downhill. After a couple of hundred yards, his footprints were joined by many others. Not far from here - the wilting circle of grass where the craft had landed.

Interpretation was easy enough. He had wandered downhill - started to pick some flowers - and was interrupted by the appearance of the hovercraft. Which he had walked toward. Why? Not homesickness - surely. She did not think he had the capacity to fool her so completely. More likely, knowing he was caught, he had walked deliberately away from the cave, to make sure it stayed undiscovered and unexplored.

Shit. Shit. To put himself deliberately into Cray's hands - that was suicide. _Suicide_.

She walked blindly back up to the cave, picked up Peeta's bow and sat down again on the boulder - scene of her morning's brief bout of content. Such things never did last long for her.

* * *

"Why'd you leave the Capitol, anyway?"

Prim loved going to Cinna's - and he was one of the few people among the refugees whom Katniss could reasonably tolerate, as well - so they often spent time with him. Prim admired the flair with which he had decorated his modest room, as well as the beautiful fabrics he had brought with him from the Capitol. Katniss just liked talking to him.

When the refugee group had settled in an abandoned water treatment plant outside of District Thirteen's ruins, Katniss and Prim had claimed a small storage building that stood off on its own, while most of the rest had moved into individual offices and conference rooms in the main building. Group meetings were held in the old control room or - when the weather was better - out in the overgrown parking lot, where a bonfire could be raised among the creeping vines and the thick tufts of grass poking through the concrete.

Cinna had been a stylist for the Hunger Games - a fact which Katniss was inclined to view with suspicion, except that there just was something so fundamentally trustworthy about him. She had never seen him before and eventually they worked out that he had just started as a stylist at about the time that she had removed herself from Twelve. After a few short years in the role, he had fled.

"I couldn't achieve my goals from the Capitol," he told her with a smile.

"What do you mean?"

"You've heard mention of the Underground, I believe?"

She shrugged.

"It's primarily Capitol-based; has to be, considering the Districts are so heavily controlled and cut off from each other. And - it's also largely based around the Games. That's where the unrest is - the deep, internal unrest, hidden away - sometimes hidden from ourselves - but always there: an affront to basic dignity."

"I'm so happy you all have the luxury to ponder the indignity of the Games," she replied sarcastically. "I guess it's never occurred to us in the Districts since we're all so busy working and dying, and all."

He continued, unruffled. "It is difficult, when things are so heavily watched. In the Districts, you are watched for disobedience, but in the Capitol we are watched for disloyalty: and that can mean anything the President wants it to mean. My stylist partner was murdered by Peacekeepers - on Snow's orders. It was about to happen to me."

Katniss licked her lips. "What did you do?"

"Designed costumes," he said, smiling evasively.

"Your job, in fact."

His look was very patient. "No. My job was to find someone - some tribute, strong but innocent, naturally rootable but naturally rebellious … attractive, if possible - though youth in itself is often attractive enough … and dress him - or her - in the symbols of the rebellion, to reignite its ashes in the Districts."

"What do you mean - the symbols of the rebellion?"

Cinna shook his head. "It would have to depend, in part, on the tribute. There is a fine line - and only so much you can do, when dressing up tributes. Traditionally, they must reflect their District industry - in other words, they must be dressed in the garb of their own slavery. But there are things you can do - with fire, for instance. That was a specialty of mine - and Portia's. But we wanted to eventually bring in the mockingjay …."

"The bird?"

"Yes - a very old symbol of the rebellion, in a way."

"Was the symbol used - widely - on tokens, say? I found one - it's back at my place, actually - deep in the woods outside District Twelve."

"I would very much like to see it, but in fact I would suspect that is the earlier symbol - the jabberjay."

"What? The jabberjay - that bird was a spy!"

Cinna nodded. His careful Capitol manner was loosening as he started warming up to the topic, and even Prim, sitting by his window, had stopped sorting through his fabric collection to listen in interest. "The early tokens were used as a warning - a signal that jabberjays were listening in and conversation should proceed accordingly. Thus, they evolved into a badge of recognition among the rebels as their numbers dwindled. Later, when the mockingjays emerged, the symbol evolved, also. Something had survived, despite the Capitol's intent. And the symbol persisted."

"So - by dressing a tribute as the mockingjay - you planned to - spark a rebellion?"

"That was only part of it. Something of the sort had _almost_ worked once before. A girl named Maysilee: from your own District, in fact - she had come from a family of rebel leaders which managed to survive the Dark Days - wore a mockingjay pin to the arena and the unrest her participation and death spurred in the Districts led to years of crackdowns … decades, actually. I think it's only - what? - a dozen or so years ago now that the last of the small rebellions were put down. We were so close. We just didn't have all the elements in place."

"That sounds too simple - a tribute with a symbol? If it was that simple, why not keep trying it - every year?"

"Well - for one thing, the President is as keenly aware of the symbol as the Underground is. For another - yes, you're right, of course; that is too simple. There needed to be a special tribute and - more than that - a special storyline. Something that can wake up the Capitol along with the Districts. Maysilee made an unusual friend in the arena - the eventual victor, in fact. That had an unexpected consequence - the Capitol was as invested in the friendship as it was in the outcome of the Game. If she had survived with him to the end - it would have made for an interesting dilemma - a moral dilemma for the audience. But," he concluded with a sigh, "it didn't play out that way and we were never able to recreate it."

Katniss pondered this for a moment. Weird thought: a friendship, or even a romance, growing up among the arena competitors. Difficult to accomplish in a place where it was kill-or-be-killed … interesting to imagine a Capitol audience rooting for both friends - or lovers - then confronting the dilemma at the end, caring for both. Were they capable? That was the question. Then she frowned. "So - what happened? How did you get in trouble?"

"A few years ago, we tried to force the issue. Not with a tribute - with one of the Victors. She was a good sort - District 4, eighteen-year-old girl, very attractive, very upright. One of the junior stylists fell in love with her and their romance kind of played out on television - before the Games a little, but more afterward. Anyway, everyone loved it. During her Victory Tour, I volunteered to help with wardrobe and we tried a mockingjay outfit, combined with fire. It went down pretty well on tour - not so well with Snow. The junior stylist disappeared, the ploy went nowhere, and I had to flee. I shipped some of my costumes to Haymitch, just in case another opportunity arose, but honestly - I'm not sure they'll ever be able to utilize that particular strategy. It's too bad, really - ever since I could remember, I've wanted to play my part in bringing down the Games."

Katniss smiled at him. She was pleased at the confirmation that her instincts were right - that Cinna was a person worthy of her friendship. "Well you're here, aren't you? Supposedly that will amount to something - eventually."

Cinna's expression fell. "I know that's what Thirteen thinks, but I don't know. I still think - I still know, in my heart - that the Districts are going to need more than a handful of guns - more than the call to arms from the District that betrayed them before. They need a sign - something to rally around. It's always been that way - no reason to think that that has changed."

* * *

Maysilee Donner was very much on Haymitch's mind as he crept through the Seam, under cover of darkness, cursing himself under his breath. For years, Plutarch and the Underground had been trying to yank him, stiffly protesting, into their various plans and schemes. It's not that he disagreed with their aims. But - and this was the thing - he had chosen, for once and all, to protect his own life. To keep himself out of obvious danger and just live with the shit that had been piled on him.

Never since the arena had he armed himself and snuck around to carry out acts of outright resistance. God damn it.

He had concocted the tranquilizer from a combination of some of the medicines that Katniss had left behind. A blow dart - in fact _the_ blow dart, the one that had belonged to _her_ , his only remaining souvenir from his Games - the needles dipped in poison and one, two, three Peacekeepers knocked out along the eastern perimeter of the fence. The fence was still on but the cameras, he knew, were off. They had staying power for just a couple of hours a day, anyway, and their infrared settings hadn't worked for years, so they were useless at night.

There had been no romance between him and Maysilee, thirty-five years ago in the arena. He knew it would have been strategic - to invent such a romance, really ramp up the audience in their favor. But he had been loyal to his girl at home - and it remained one of the worst ironies of his life: a fake romance with a dead tribute _might_ have spared his girlfriend's life. She was killed - along with the remnants of his Seam-born family - while he was on the Victory Tour. Just one of a string of events that had followed - that had been sparked by - his win … among them the resurgence of the mockingjay symbol - some taking to wear it, as Maysilee had, in the open - and the constant crackdowns. Cray's predecessor had attempted to suppress anything within sniffing distance of dissidence, which caused more resentful resistance and then more punishment and more resentment - the volume and scope of the violence increasing all the time until, finally, there was an "accident" at the mine which wiped out a suspiciously large number of the agitators. Fearing for his neck - legitimately - at the hands of the furious miners, the Head Peacekeeper had retired and ushered in Cray's long, quiet - perhaps more subtly poisonous - reign.

In the meanwhile, through all that, Haymitch had stood apart: protected by the Capitol, employed by the Capitol. Afraid to step too obviously far out of line because his crimes would always be taken out on other people. He just went to the Games and started mentoring to death the people he had grown up with - then the children of his remaining friends - and now, more recently, their grandchildren. It was still Maysilee he remembered best; he considered her the first of the long line of tributes to die on his watch. They haunted his memories, every one - her more than most, because it had been up close. And she could have won - she could have. She was the one person whose place he could have taken.

He crouched down next to the fence, listening to the low, sputtering buzz. And why was he out here - risking retribution - all on the hunch of an addled young man and his predictions about this strange, flighty girl? Would she even come back for him? She had already risked everything to go back to him - but surely, hopefully, she would not take the risk this time, now that it was tenfold ….

It was just after midnight when he straightened up and made to return home, worried that his victims would soon be stirring - and then he finally heard the low whistle, just above his head. He squinted up into the tree that was just on the other side of the fence, but he couldn't see anything until she slipped down to the ground and approached the fence.

He held out his palms. "It's lit," he said softly.

"I know," she replied. "I used to sit up in that tree and wait for the power to go off - it's taking a long time, this time."

"There's no telling when it will peter out this time," he told her. "Can you - climb that overhanging branch and drop in?"

She glanced behind her. "It's too high - I'd probably bust my ankles. Unless - can you catch me?"

He let out a long sigh. "Sure - anyway, we'd better try. I want to go home."

It was a little noisy - he oophed as she landed, awkwardly, in his arms - and they hurried away in case anyone had heard.

He did not lead her to his house - he was compromised now, he told her - but instead broke into one of the empty houses surrounding his.

"Basement?" she asked him.

"Kitchen - near the back door," he said, shaking his head. "We want to hear if they come, and we don't want to be pinned."

They sat across from each other at the kitchen table and were silent for awhile, listening to the darkness - then she stirred and asked, "How'd you know - to come looking for me?"

"I had a hunch - based on a very cryptic conversation I had today with a mutual friend."

"He is here, then."

"Where else would he be?"

She shrugged uncomfortably. "I was afraid they might take him straight to the Capitol."

"No - Cray wants information from him. Information about you, in fact."

Her expression drew in. "I know, I -. I have to figure out some way to free him."

Haymitch frowned at her. "I think that might be outside the limits of our abilities, girl - even yours, which seem to be considerable. Best you take your mother and get out - leave me to get the word out about the rebellion, and chalk this one up to 'you tried your best.' It's not on you that he left the fence …."

She shook her head. "No. No - I don't leave without Peeta."

He squinted at her. "Well. Well, well. That boy seems an unlikely romantic hero, but he sure is in the middle of one complicated page-turner."

"It doesn't have to be about romance," she retorted. "It's about fairness."

"Well, in all fairness - you should know that your boyfriend's wife just died."

She drew in her breath. "Oh! Does he know?"

"Yeah. Everybody does. It's caused quite the stir around here - the young husband desperately stealing medicines for his dying wife, only to miss her death and now face it himself. Very sweet and tragic, don't you think?"

She thought of Cinna and smiled. "Star-crossed lovers," she said.

Haymitch shook his head. "What are you talking about?"

"Nothing - nothing. Haymitch, look - we know some things that other people don't know. Useful things. We know Cray loved Melly and that he's vulnerable there. He may have been illegally married to her - I'm unclear on that - but some records were forged to make it look like she was married to Peeta, and that might be of use."

"Really?"

"We know that Melly knew some things about Cray. Bad things. And she may have left some proof. Can we get to her house …?"

"That's been turned inside out."

"Before she lived with Peeta, I think he said that she was homeless and she lived near the railyard, or something - maybe in one of the abandoned train cars?"

Haymitch's eyes lit up so much they glowed in the dark. "Perhaps … that's uncomfortably close to the Mayor's house, but … do you know anything about what she knew?"

"Some," Katniss said. "He's extorted a lot of the merchants, apparently. He assaulted someone from the Capitol one year - during the Reaping. And - I don't know if there's any proof, but he may have rigged some of the Reapings somehow."

After a long silence, Haymitch said, "Something like that - there could be an uprising even without solid proof. Anything else?"

"Well - there's me, right? Or, should I say Darius?"

"Yes," said Haymitch thoughtfully. "That's a biggie. Although, Cray might have really thought it _was_ Darius. He was known to flirt with girls - not everyone liked that and if I recall correctly that was proof enough for some. I was in the Capitol when it all went down, so I'm not sure …."

Katniss shook her head. "He told Melly he had Darius framed. Again - I don't know if there is any proof, but -."

"Yes, yes." Haymitch started tapping his fingers on the tabletop. "A dramatic resurrection - or a quiet word to Cray so he'll quietly drop the charges and you can disappear again? I wonder."

"No, Haymitch," she said. "It's even bigger than that. We have a job to do. Two birds with one stone. And speaking of birds - I've been told you have some tribute costumes that might serve my purpose."

* * *

Katniss had rejected three dresses before lighting on the suit. It was beautiful - gorgeous, actually. Black and sleek, fitted but flexible, comfortable to wear and allowing for ease of movement - but quite clearly comprised of protective layers of armored fabric. At the shoulder-blades was a kind of decorative out-jutting, suggestive of wings. It fit high on the neck and included high boots - it protected every inch of her except for her face.

She stared at herself in the mirror, braiding her long hair so that it rested over her right shoulder. The scar on her face - the remnant of the grazing bullet - was now red and a bit angry. She looked tough, battle-tested.

"What on earth did Cinna mean this for?" she asked Haymitch, coming back out into the kitchen, where he was sleepily uncorking a bottle. It was early morning and he looked like he had slept about as well as she had.

"I don't know. Cinna had - I mean has - a fanciful imagination. He had this whole story in his head - this tribute who would come along and spark a revolution. He thought it would be a girl - or he hoped it would be, at least - wider range of design possibilities. He put a lot of store on symbols - and on things that had once almost worked before."

"That girl from this District - with the pin?"

Haymitch squinted at his bottle. "Yeah - that one. Madge's aunt, Maysilee. The Capitol never re-aired that Game in the Districts, but it was so popular with the Capitol that they aired it every year during the Games there - modified, a bit, to gloss over the ending. Cinna grew up watching that thing, obsessing over it."

"Did you work with him?"

Haymitch looked surprised. 'Yes - for several years. He was the District Twelve stylist, until he fled."

Katniss looked down at the table, tracing through the dust. Signs and symbols … a story … "Haymitch," she said, "while you're out today - if you can stop by Peeta's house …? And see if he has any leftover paint?"

* * *

Melly's papers made for short reading. They were weathered and mostly indecipherable. Most were in the same handwriting - they assumed hers - and she had pages of notes, but much of it was in what appeared to be her own invented shorthand. One promising exception - written in another hand - was a ledger of sorts - monetary figures paired only by dates and initials. Haymitch thought it likely to be a partial record of Cray's extortionary exercises.

"Where these rows abruptly end," he said grimly, "if we can figure out who these people are and match to potential reaped relatives …."

Katniss grunted. She was engaged in her own project - kneeling on the floor on a bedsheet, a can of brick-red paint beside her.

"I know - but it's a start."

She left him to it. She thought that would take too much time - and they had barely more than a week, now, until the Reaping.

* * *

And then time really crashed in around them.

"Snow's dead," announced Haymitch early the next morning, shaking her awake with the greeting.

Her heart stopped for a moment. "Shit," she said. Thirteen would be gearing up - before long, the bullets would be flying. And also ... "Shit. Are they putting off the Games?"

"No." He explained.

She jumped up and started pacing around in the newborn light, thoughts racing. "Haymitch, are there any Peacekeepers - any at all - that you can trust maybe even a little bit? If they could be persuaded to join us…."

" _No_. You came in here telling me the revolution is starting - I've already contacted whatever is left here of the underground. We breathe a word to the Peacekeepers, a syllable, we put their lives at risk, as well as our own."

"But they have weapons."

"And we have numbers. Yes - people will be killed. That's what a revolution _does_. That's how bad people get away with oppression - because the good people don't want to spill blood and no one wants to die. The bad guys gamble against the survival instinct, and then keep going until the breaking point. So, we keep getting to this point, over and over again."

"Are we even worth saving?" she asked him, shivering.

"Sure," he replied. "Maybe. Some of us? I don't know. Anyway - sweetheart - we're on the path, now. Once you start, there's no easy way back."

* * *

It was years since her last Reaping Day.

She didn't sleep the night before, just paced and thought, and rethought, reconsidered, and finally reconciled herself to her plans. Before dawn broke, she ate a bowl of cereal - soggy and too sweet with the canned milk poured over it. She ate it only to sustain her over the morning. She was not hungry. There was a knot in her stomach.

She was a prey to memories - getting up just this early on those days, meeting Gale for the hunt. Pragmatic, yes - to hunt on Reaping Day was always profitable. But it had been more than that: now that she was older, now that she could look back on those days with distance, she could admit to it. What she missed - what she still missed - was that moment of freedom, the escape through the fence, the act of rebellion committed on the very day that the Capitol had marked off for itself.

She could almost smell it - the fir trees and the summer flowers; Gale's hair and skin; the leather jacket; the warm blood and musky fur.

Today would be very different.

She dressed in the black suit - the "mockingjay" outfit, she called it to herself. It smelled like nothing or - if at all - something faintly synthetic, plastic, oil-based. Not much like herself, but that was all right. The important thing was, she felt strong and protected. And as she slipped out into the darkness, she also felt invisible.

She slipped among the shadows, made her way into Town. Despite the fact that three Peacemakers patrolling the fence line had all taken mysteriously ill and passed out, no substantial investigation or upgrade in security had taken place. Cray's time and resources were spent on his questioning of Peeta, and no one wanted to give further bad news to Theoph - so the guard was as light as it usually was. Katniss easily evaded what few eyes there were until she made her way to the Town Square, then climbed carefully and quietly up the drainpipe of the two-story building opposite the Justice Building.

She allowed herself a slight indulgence - she liked heights, or appreciated them, at least: she liked the feeling of the superior vantage point, the way you could turn around and see everything on all horizons.

But this was an open height, not hidden among the leaves, so she only stood for a moment before crouching down below the brick ledge at the top of the building and swinging her quiver off her back. Her dozen arrows were packed tight together along with a cloth that had been rolled up so tightly in order to fit in next to them that it resisted her efforts to remove it. She had to empty the quiver entirely in order to pull it out. She pried apart a metal panel on a nearby vent cover, stuffed the sheet inside and pushed the vent box back together as best as possible.

Dawn was pink around the lip of the sky as she refilled her quiver. There were _hours_ to go and suddenly she was hungry - the cold cereal an unsatisfying lump in her gut - and, as had always happened before, the feeling focused her. And she would need her focus - the Reaping itself might be hours away, but the Capitol would be arriving soon enough to set up. Before long she heard the long-familiar sound of the train; soon after that, the heavy trucks drove into the town square.

Katniss took a deep breath and went to the small concrete vestibule with the door that led into the building's stairwell. It was dark, and she had to run her fingers along the wall as she crept down the stairs. At the landing between the roof and the upper floor, there was - as Haymitch had assured her - a small electric closet, which she yanked open with some difficulty (it was not locked, but had been closed so long that the door was weather-warped and sticky). It was primarily occupied by a large breaker board and a stinky old mop and some empty buckets, but she was able to squeeze in, flatten herself against the wall and close the door. Within moments, she could hear the Capitol crew - their pitchy accents very distinct - ascending the stairs.

She wasn't sure how much time had passed before she heard them descending again. They would - as Haymitch had also assured her - leave only the cameraperson on the roof. The rest would be stationed with their equipment on the ground.

When the noise died down, she ascended the stairs again. She had been planning to stay inside, but realized that she would not be able to bear the closeness of the closet - like a coffin it was - nor would she be able to keep time very well. She forced her breathing down before exiting into what now was a full, bright summer morning. She pulled her bow and an arrow with two swift motions, but the woman on the roof - back to her, fiddling with the camera - had not heard her, or was paying no attention to noises. Katniss walked softly to the other side of the vestibule and flattened herself against the wall. All she had to do now was ...

"Who are -?"

Before Katniss was even aware of exactly what had happened, the woman was lying at her feet. Katniss had had the presence of mind - as the shadow had rounded the corner - not to shoot, but to strike out with the bow, instead, knocking the woman out with a swift blow to the head. Problematically, now … what to do with her? As unpleasant a thought as it was, it might be better for Katniss if she had killed her. The only thing she could do was use some coils of spare cord among the woman's equipment to bind her hands and feet. As the woman began to stir, she dragged her over to the door and tied her hands to the doorknob. At least she'd have fair warning if anyone was to come up to join them on the roof. Katniss retrieved her folded up sheet and set it up on the ledge in front of her camera. Everything was in place.

The woman started to scream, but fell obediently silent once the arrow was pointed at her.

"Shush - you'll live today if you just be quiet."

A sudden burst of static came from the camera-woman's belt, and Katniss pulled out a walkie-talkie. She didn't quite understand what the garbled voices were asking, but thrust the device at the woman and nodded harshly.

"Ay - Ay-OK-I'm almost finished with L-07," she stuttered.

"What does that mean?" Katniss hissed, shutting off the talkie.

"I have to finish turning the camera on - they were asking if something was wrong with the feed."

"Talk me through it," replied Katniss, shaking her head.

Now, this was odd. Katniss peered through the lens of the camera as it switched on and nearly jumped back as the Capitol workers on the stage appeared even larger than life. She swung it around, played with the dials until she got a view and a distance that she thought looked like what she had seen on TV before. She had an amazingly clear view of the stage and wondered anxiously about the cameras on the ground. She expected them on her, eventually - but not this early. She hoped they were busy setting up their own shots.

She was looking into the camera - experimenting with using it as a scope, seeing if she could use it to aim - when the Tributes were shuffled in and her heart leapt at the site of the blond prisoner. At closer glance, she could see the bruises on his face, the awkward tilt of his nose. But - he was still alive, and that was something. If she could see him, she could save him. And that was all.

It was no surprise to her when his name was called. It was what she had anticipated and planned for. In this moment, when they called for a volunteer to take his place, she would shoot her first arrow and she would ….

"No - no volunteers!" His voice ran across her thoughts, halting her in her motion for her arrow. "These wonderful people," he added, "have done enough - helping to mourn my lovely wife…."

Katniss could feel below her the frisson and energy of the crowd responding to his words. But she looked through the camera and focused it on Cray, who was standing on the stage just behind him. A murderous look was crawling over his face.

"Please, please - remember her the way she was when she was a child - orphaned and innocent - and not what she became, abused by our Head Peacekeeper, like so many of your daughters. She was -."

Katniss gasped. As the crowd roared out its response, Peacekeepers stepped up to grab both of the Tributes. Effie was shoved out of the way by Cray himself and he yanked Peeta from the microphone with one hand, the other reaching for his gun. The girl who had been reaped started screaming as she was hauled back toward the Justice Building. Katniss felt the situation getting away from her. She knocked the camera over and unrolled the sheet over the ledge so that the mockingjay symbol, painted in the color of dried blood, was unfurled over the back of the crowd. One foot on the ledge, holding it in place - one eye shut as she pulled the string, one arrow aimed at the stage. Her fingers were steady as she let it loose and it hit her target, dead accurate.

One wild scream - coming from many voices - and then a quick moment of silence. Peeta looked up - directly up - and she could not quite meet his eyes at this distance, but she knew that he knew her as surely as she knew him. And then everyone was looking up and back to her and the shouts began again.

"Revolution!" she screamed. "Revolution!"

Then the bullets started flying, and she dove down to avoid them. Let loose, her banner slid off the ledge to fall upon the Town Square.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter Fifteen**

* * *

Why always this hint of an unhappy ending?

Clouds of almost human appearance

Gathering on the horizon, but the rest lovely

With the air so mild and the sea untroubled.

"Clouds Gathering"  
Charles Simic

* * *

Madge woke to her ache.

This recent pain on her back had stolen away her very last comfort - those few moments upon waking when her brain was numb to her current circumstances, forgetful, and allowed her instead to stay a moment in her dreams. They were - perversely - always so _good,_ and she loved the way they had of lingering a moment before dispersal, not the sights but the _smells_ of them - something about strawberries, about cedarwood, about smoked rabbit.

But nowadays the pain woke her, a swift, sudden reminder of her late-term pregnancy and the horror of her life. Whatever she had been dreaming about fluttered away, now, unremembered.

She eased herself out of bed, silently. She was alone, but had trained over long years to be quiet, to be mute. "The time will eventually come," she reminded hersef, "when your silence will finally pay off."

She had three maternity dresses - two of them had been her mother's; one her mother had made for her before she died. It was white and hung on her, shift-like, like a nightgown. They hadn't had much time, nor much to work with. Needlework had brought on her mother's migraines, and Madge had never been taught to sew. Not that it was important - how well it fit, how good it looked. The primary thing was that it was white, which was Madge's "color," which had been the color of the women of the family, going back, back into the lost fog of time.

Today, she dressed in her pink dress; a sundress that would do well for going out to the market on a sultry July morning. Then she sat at her small vanity and squinted at her wan face in the warped mirror as she brushed out, then coiled, her long yellow hair. Then she opened the vanity drawer to glance at her sparse collection of jewelry. She passed over everything except for the small gold pin that she wore on special occasions, in memory - so she told her husband - of her aunt. Did he know - most people no longer knew - the significance of the symbol? If he did, he didn't care. It was almost fifteen years since the last of the dissidents had been put down, to the Capitol's knowledge. The Capitol was confident now - powerful, yes, but growing bloated and soft even as Snow doddered toward death. (Even her husband - who shouldn't have been allowed to marry her, if people were paying closer attention - had felt comfortable enough to laugh at Snow earlier this year, passing on a rumor that the old man had had a stroke and drooled uncontrollably.)

She touched the pin but passed it over. At the back of the vanity drawer was a secret compartment and in here was a small, sharp dagger. Its place was in a sheath at her thigh, concealed under her long skirts - she had worn it since the age of twelve. Despite a couple of close calls of near discovery by Theoph, she did not move through her days without it.

If he ever did discover it ….

Madge escaped the house without eating breakfast, rejoicing in the excuse to just get out of the place. She didn't have far to go. Market was in the square just outside her front door. And everyone perked up when they saw her, eyeing her empty basket and knowing that she brought cash. They kept their pity for her in their eyes while they inquired politely after her pregnancy - but she saw the pity and was grateful for it. She pressed an extra coin on everyone.

Strawberries always gave her pause. They were not the plump, tart berries that a gray-eyed boy had once brought out of the woods - they were small and dark, grown in crowded gardens. She ached when she bought them, resentfully almost. But she wouldn't leave any of the merchants out. She was spending Capitol money and she would spend every last damn cent of it.

She even went to look over the stalls in the side streets, where people sold handmade crafts. It was not nearly as interesting as the trade that had flourished at the Hob back in the old days - mostly cob dolls and crudely-woven baskets, rough stick furniture, etc. She couldn't spend her money as freely here - food could be excused on the account books, not rustic knick-knacks. But a blanket for the baby she could buy. A knit cap for her father. Again, coins were pressed into grateful palms.

On these side streets, today, she noticed a different energy than in the square. She heard the name a couple of times of someone who had just died - Melly Mellark (many times Madge had heard the girl's name shouted during heated exchanges between Theoph and Cray) - whose husband was sitting in jail, not even able to attend the funeral of the girl for whom he had given so much, _risked_ so much. It wasn't fair, people were saying. Anyway, Cray let so much pass, why not this of all things? The Mellarks had had _such_ bad luck.

Madge was surprised to hear this conversation. Peeta's marriage had been a huge scandal - oh, everyone pitied him, but in exasperation: he had made his own bed, so to speak. Some people even disliked his mother enough that their pity was openly delighted. She'd always needed taking down a peg or two and if they didn't say it to her face, they said it behind her back - serve her right, to have a whore for a daughter-in-law. That's what happens when you are too rough with your own kids, etc. etc.

Not surprisingly, the Mellarks had not set up a stall today, so, on the way back home, she stopped at the bakery to buy her bread. As she stepped through the doorway, she paused for a moment, feeling a tingle go down her spine, as if she was being watched. She looked around, but saw nothing.

The oldest of the Mellark brothers was minding the counter and nodded at her when she came in, but did not speak. She didn't either, until it was time to indicate the loaf she wanted for the day. She paid in silence, then turned around - and screamed.

Haymitch ( _how on earth had he managed to sneak in behind her,_ she wondered furiously, her heart thumping in her ears) - Haymitch jumped at the sound. If she hadn't been mortified at him, she would have laughed at his curious expression.

"Shh - Maysie - shh," he said.

She frowned at him, remembering the first time this had happened.

It had been graduation day - another hot summer morning - everyone still reeling from the double murders. Suspicion was just starting to light on Gale Hawthorne, but he stood up with his class, gray eyes all aloof. She had been worried. He didn't seem as _sad_ as he should. She had been seated very near him - not graduating herself, but in her mother's place, as she so often was, next to her father. She watched him breathe - every bit of him calm, even bemused. Plenty of people were still upset - she was personally devastated - she had almost refused to come today - and Peeta Mellark had absolutely collapsed. She had a strong suspicion why.

She had been worried about Gale even _before_ Katniss and Prim had disappeared. A mood in him had changed that year, and as she had made a life study of reading his emotions, this puzzled her and nagged on her, keeping her up at night. Something was wrong, something ineffable - and urgent, now, with the investigation of the murders. What she knew - that he loved Katniss and that Katniss had not loved him back - she tried really hard not to think about. It was a motive - a motive probably no one else knew. Motive is not proof, she reminded herself. _Anything can be a motive. I have a motive, come to that._

But she worried. He had always alarmed her every bit as much as he had drawn her - there was rugged power in him, real power - not at all like the empty position her father held, the one that was grinding him down. Her father was answerable to everyone; Gale - not so much. This fascinated and scared her.

After commencement, she walked home alone; eyes followed her. Everyone was sitting on porches or in doorways, avoiding the stifling hot air of their houses. Then, as she reached the square, someone hissed: "Maysie … Maysieeeee!"

It was Haymitch Abernathy, staggering drunk, bearing down on her. Her likeness to her aunt confused him, it seemed, and of course today she was wearing her best dress and her aunt's own pin. She stopped and he stopped, squinting at her in confusion - some sense of place and time struggling to return to his sunburnt expression.

"I'm Madge," she said, patiently. "Madge."

* * *

…. He didn't seem drunk, now. His eyes were clear enough. And he _knew_ her by now - they shared the stage every year at the Reaping. She cocked her head in a questioning expression and he laughed.

"Uh, sorry - Madge. It's Madge, right?"

She nodded. "Good day to you, Haymitch," and walked past him as gracefully as possible under the burden of a third trimester pregnancy.

But he followed her outside, continuing to apologize. "You must think I'm a delirious old man," he grunted.

She turned to him. Her feet and her back ached and her basket was heavy. "No, of course not," she said. "Sometimes we all live in the past."

He reached out and took the basket from her. "Let me carry this for you," he said, then walked abruptly around a corner - away from the square, not toward it - and back to the alley behind the row of merchant shops. She followed him, more puzzled than alarmed.

He stopped in the shade of an apple tree on the back side of the bakery. It offered a slight relief against the growing heat, but Madge leaned heavily against the back fence, her feet just about done. "What?" she asked him.

"What I say stays with you. For now, at least. It goes nowhere else. Especially not in the direction of your illustrious husband."

Madge moistened her cracked lips, biding for time. This was either of immense importance - or Haymitch nonsense. She wondered if she would be able to tell the difference. "No problem," she said. "I don't talk to him. Is this to do with the Games?"

"Only the long ones," he answered. He ran his hand through his steely hair and sighed. "It's starting up again" he said, lowering his voice.

"What do you mean?"

"The rebellion. It's alive, if not entirely well. It's made it to Thirteen, picked itself up a little attitude and is preparing to make its entrance."

Madge giggled nervously to hide her disappointment. So - this was nothing, after all. "You're not making much sense."

"I don't have many details. Currently, all I know of the returning rebellion is one Katniss Everdeen."

Madge swayed, lost her hold of the fence, and started sliding gracelessly to the ground. Haymitch grabbed at her and some of the little strawberries spilled out of the basket and rolled around their feet.

" _What_ ," Madge said, hoarsely.

Haymitch leaned in to whisper the rest and Madge's breath started to feel heavy in her chest as he spoke. She tried to focus on his words, but her own memories and some long-pent emotions kept overwhelming his voice. She wished he would hurry up and finish so she could just go ahead and faint.

"How long do we have?"

"'Til Reaping Day. It's going to start with the cameras on all of us, this time."

She touched her belly. "It's too soon. Or too late. I can't - I'm due in weeks."

He shook his head. "That's a pity, but we'll need you. Once things get rolling, we are going to have to bail out of here so fast that people's heads will start spinning. Your half of the District will listen to you. Plenty are still alive who remember the Donnor family's leadership in the last uprisings. It's in you, if you don't know it."

Madge pursed her lips at this. The sun was beating down on them both - she felt weak, faint and helpless. But she thought of the knife against her skin and she knew of what she was capable.

* * *

Madge wore her usual white. Her usual pin. She coiled her long hair and pulled out her dagger. She stared at it for a long time this morning - it was very old, the veteran of wars going back long before the Dark Days, back before there was even a Panem. That history was almost completely lost and gone; all Madge knew was that, when the desperate roamed the wreckage of the old country, the women of her family had defended themselves by any means necessary. Madge's grandmother had impressed this on her from a very young age: to never use it until the last moment of desperation. At times - especially over the years of her forced marriage - she had wondered if she had let that moment pass.

She had also been advised to befriend "that Everdeen girl and learn to shoot arrows." She had missed that moment, also.

Or, so she had thought.

Madge followed her father out to the stage, shaded her eyes against the sun, and resisted the temptation to look around for any sign of Katniss' planned entrance. Or some sign that any of the people Haymitch had promised to contact would show some spine for once, when the time came. Or - to be completely honest - any sign, somehow, that Katniss' return also heralded Gale's.

She caught Peeta's eye - momentarily - as she sat down in her place on the stage, and forced herself not to stare at his bruised face. She looked down at her feet, and concentrated instead on the humming sound emanating from the crowd. As it had been on market day, it was different - filled with an unusually anxious energy.

When Thalia, a young woman who had been arrested the night before Snow's death, was called up to the stage, there was a stir. Madge felt it in her bones, even as she pretended to listen to her husband's running commentary … something about them soon being able to move to the Capitol, or District Two, at least, now that Junior was in power … somehow, someway, the people had come to the end of their capacity to submit.

"Peeta Mellark!"

Madge looked up then and watched him limp up to the stage. She was struck by the look of calmness, even serenity, on the young man's face. She hadn't seen him in awhile, and she was also struck by how much older he seemed. Not in years, exactly - just in maturation. She remembered a shaking boy, faint-looking himself as he was led off the stage when his brother had taken his place. That had been the break in him - from then, whatever promise he'd had (or so she had heard) had been squandered on idleness and his unsavory acquaintances. He seemed almost beatific as he faced the crowd, in spite of his recent loss. As she had thought once before of a young man on a stage, he didn't seem _sad_ enough.

Theoph stopped talking abruptly when Peeta grabbed the microphone from Effie and used his brief time to stir up the crowd with his tribute to his late wife. And for once, the District was not silent. After all, Madge thought, Snow is dead. He was not immortal, all-powerful. The Games are not inevitable. The fence need not contain us...

And then all hell broke loose. Cray yanked Peeta back and was in the act of putting a gun to his head - a reckless and surely fatal act to pull on a designated Tribute, no matter what the circumstances - when he crumpled to the ground, an arrow in his throat. A stunned, collective gasp rent the air, followed by an intense silence. Peeta looked up, expectantly, toward the sky and Madge followed the direction of his eyes, in time to see the banner unfurl down the side of the Peacekeepers' own headquarters: the mockingjay symbol.

 _Revolution! Revolution!_ a voice screamed.

Silence, still - and then a sudden outburst of bullets. And then screams - and some answering calls - _the revolution! the revolution!_ Madge stood, as the chaos on the stage stirred around her. Effie Trinket made a break for the Justice Hall, the nearby Capitol crew following right on her heels. The two tributes were dragged behind them, Peeta struggling desperately. The District Peacekeepers drew in in a circle around Cray's body, befuddled - some of them shooting randomly up into the air. The Capitol security, better trained and grimly removed from loyalty to either Cray or the District, formed a hasty line at the back of the stage and started to march forward. Her husband recovered from his stunned silence and rose to his feet to stand beside her. He turned toward the back of the stage, gesturing toward the hapless Peacekeepers.

"Who is that?" shouted Theoph. "Get the tributes to the train! Get up to that -!"

Madge stopped his voice with a swift strike of the knife into the side of his neck. One stroke down, one stroke to the side. As her grandmother had taught her. Red blood splashed all over her white dress.

"Madge! Down!"

She looked around, her eyes swimming. It was Haymitch, crouching down behind the chairs on the stage, gesturing to her frantically. She shook her head dizzily and then was jolted by something - pushed by some immense force to the ground.

"Madge!"

Her father's voice, very faint.

She moved her head slightly and could see the crowd on the square, surging up towards her. Some of them fell as they came, but mostly they came. Guns fell abandoned by some of the Peacekeepers - some on purpose - to be picked up by the oncoming crowd. She could see tangles of legs and feet and the light around her began to darken. She knew she would soon be trampled to death, but she couldn't move. She couldn't even feel her fingers.

" _Stop the train! Stop the train! Stop the train! Somebody stop the train!_ "

* * *

"Where's Katniss?" asked Madge, not looking at the boy, but down at her own feet.

"Dunno," he replied, in that cool, crisp, autumn tang of a voice.

She wished she had the nerve to show him her knife, ask him what he thought of it - talk to him about the tales of survival she had heard over the years. She knew he wasn't all that interested in quiet girls in pretty dresses, but she just couldn't get herself to show him that side of her who wasn't.

"She spent all weekend in the woods," continued Gale. "I guess. Haven't seen her since Friday. But she knows how to take care of herself."

Madge looked up then and gazed as long as she dared into the depths of his gray eyes.

"So, I guess it's just me you'll be dealing with for now," he continued, a trifle impatiently.

Madge swallowed. She handed over the vials of rubbing alcohol and, in turn, Gale gave her a basket of pink strawberries, plump and seedy. Then, as he turned to go, she said quickly, "that's all right by me," and hurried back into the house.

* * *

She tried to struggle against a weight and a pressure that was suddenly on her back, but was helpless against it. She smelled stale moonshine, a sickening scent, and almost cried that this would be her last memory, as all the light closed in around her, and _not_ the scent of pine and smoke and cedar and -.


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter Sixteen**

* * *

"The twelfth arrow of the dozen my father bought back before time stopped,

I keep it nocked at all times."

"Twelve Arrows." Stephen Graham Jones

* * *

Katniss counted to ten, her face against the cement of the rooftop. Her breath came out, harsh and deep. She had killed someone - killed someone. _Killed someone_. And she had eleven more to kill. She had not counted on the finality of it, the feeling of fire burning in her chest with every breath.

There was a break in the sound of the bullets and now she jumped up, and she could smell the sulfur of gunpowder and she could hear the roaring going on below her. What had Haymitch said? People would be killed. Some of them would die fighting, some of them would die cowering, some of them would die fleeing. They would all die because of her _one_ arrow.

So, that was done and could not be undone. Time to mourn later. Time to second-guess her decisions later. The rebellion was begun and it would last for thirty minutes, maybe, or it would last for thirty years. It might go the way of the last one. It probably would.

Yet, she felt strangely calm - and the armor made her feel more straight-backed than normal, so even her stride was different - a confident motion that somehow conferred its manufactured confidence on to her. She went to stand over the camerawoman, who had by now succumbed to terror and was lying in a fetal position on the ground. Katniss unhitched her from the doorway - made sure her hands were bound - and warned her to lie low until the shooting stopped.

Then she sprinted down the stairs, one flight - stop, arrow ready. She looked down the landing toward the ground floor - the open lobby of the Peacekeeper's headquarters. She clamped down her mouth and her breath hitched rapid and shallow through her nostrils. The door burst open, letting in the flickering light of the day.

 _Two_ arrows. _Three_. _Four_. _Five_.

She sprinted down the stairs, hid behind a column, fitted the sixth arrow. Waited for a few beats. Then she ran for the open door, jumping over the bodies. At the last minute she turned, bent to pick up a gun - but it was heavy and bulky, and she wasn't sure how to use it, so she threw it away.

 _Six_ arrows. A lone Peacekeeper in the doorway, about to take a shot at her when she turned around and ducked and shot at him all in the same motion.

Outside, the sounds of the melee were louder - fewer bullets, but more shouting. She had to run around the entire building to get to the back of the square, and she had just turned the first corner when she had to press herself against the wall - a crowd burst suddenly out from the direction of the square, running toward the east-side neighborhoods and the Seam. But they were not fleeing - they were chasing a handful of Peacekeepers.

 _We're winning_ , Katniss realized dizzily, hurrying now toward the square. As she grew closer, the people started to see her and they slowed at her approach, staring open-mouthed at the sight of her. One of their own - at least to those who remembered her - yet in all ways different.

"Don't stop!" she shouted at them. "Keep moving!"

 _Seven_ arrows. The Capitol guards had penetrated to the back of the crowd, and she had only time to shoot at one before ducking behind a large bin. A quick reload, stand up -.

She "oophed" as the bullets hit her. Close range to the chest and she felt the reverberation in her armor even as she was knocked backward into the brick wall. _Eight_. From the ground, she still managed to get one more arrow off, and she hit her assailant square in the neck.

And now a moment of pandemonium. All around her, the crowd and the Peacekeepers erupted into an open melee - some bullets were fired, but the crowd was too thick, even for guns. And some of the people were armed. Some miners had run up from the Seam with their picks and blood was suddenly everywhere in the throng. Katniss forced herself to her feet - her ribs hurt, but a quick look down showed that the bullet had not penetrated the beautiful black suit.

She re-joined the fight. _Nine_ arrows. _Ten_.

It was just when she was pulling the second-to-last arrow out of her quiver when somebody shouted about the train. She looked up at the stage and all she could see were bodies spread out. A couple of people kneeling down. Haymitch. She scanned the stage.

She pushed her way through the crowd and the gasps that followed their recognition of her grew larger the closer she got to the stage. Someone started the call again - _revolution! revolution!_ \- and soon the word was rising over the square, angry and insistent. She jumped up the steps to join the heart of the carnage …. "Madge," she whispered hoarsely. Everything was gray and red and abruptly slow. Pools of blood mingled together - Madge, Cray, Theoph. Only Madge still lived, but for how much longer it was not clear. Haymitch and the mayor were trying desperately to staunch the flow of blood from the wound in her back.

Katniss' eyes met Haymitch's, just for a moment. "Go!" he shouted at her. "We don't want the Capitol to have hostages!"

Hostages … what? … _Peeta!_ Katniss bolted.. The Capitol folk had taken their typical Reaping Day route to the train station through the Justice Building - but Katniss was not familiar enough with the building to follow them, so she had to take the stairs and the side alley around it and from there follow the back road along the tracks to the station.

She was in time to see the black Capitol car spit dust behind it as it sped toward the train station - a short enough trip, but this would give them just enough advantage over her. _Impossible_.

She stopped for a moment - shook her head to clear it. Next to her, the railroad tracks shuddered along with the buzzing sound of the train's electric power system engaging. There would be none of the typical pauses before the train platform for a photo op with the tributes. This was an escape from the District, as quickly as it could be managed. Anyone not in the car - the Capitol peacekeepers still fighting in the square, the technical crew stuck on the rooftops - would be left behind. Anyone in the car would be sped to the Capitol - to take whatever the consequences.

Still - it would take them some time to unload. And Katniss could run. And she only had to get in range. She had two arrows left.

She took a deep breath - the staggering pain in her chest almost knocked her over - and forced herself to not only run again - but run faster than ever.

A couple of Peacekeepers exited the car first - one jumped up to the train platform but the second turned and took a shot right at her. She dived to avoid it, then tumbled quickly back up to her feet. She was still a good fifty yards away - she could see Effie being escorted into the train, a couple of crew people - then the young woman who had been reaped. Now Katniss stopped, fitted the arrow, and shot.

It was her first miss of the day. She could see it glance off the side of the train. "Fuck!" she shouted. More bullets, but she was laser-focused and angry, now. She ran toward them. The girl was dragged, screaming, into the train. The Peacekeeper reached into the car and Peeta emerged.

"Look out!" she screamed - causing both him and the Peacekeeper clasping him to turn toward her. Her twelfth arrow did not miss. Peeta fell backward as the Peacekeeper dropped. And the train began to move. Katniss came to an abrupt halt, her chest exploding in fire and relief. She saw Peeta gesturing toward the train, shouting something at the open doorway. The girl appeared briefly, as if ready to jump out to join him, but she was yanked back into it as the train pulled away.

Within seconds, it was gone - streaking silver away with a last whoosh of noise, and then everything was silent.

Katniss' muscles relaxed all at once and she dropped to her knees, panting harshly. Her mouth tasted like dust and acid and she felt suddenly quite sure that she was about to throw up. Then a shadow loomed over her and she found herself clutching gratefully to his hand as he pulled her up.

She clutched her side, trying to regain her breath, and he stared curiously at her while she tried to make her eyes focus on his face - bruised and broken, but somehow still _here_. It felt like years - not days - since she had seen him last, and all her words failed her.

"Huh," he said. "I guess I did ask Haymitch if I could see the mockingjay again. I had no idea that he would take it so literally."

To her mortification, she felt a tear roll down her cheek. "You take a lot of rescuing, Peeta Mellark."

He grinned at her. "I guess I finally figured out how to get Katniss Everdeen's attention."

They moved to each other at the same moment. The kiss was brief to meet the circumstances. The circumstances - which started overwhelming them almost immediately after the embrace - were not designed for lovers.

"What now?" he asked her. "Now that you've restarted the rebellion?"

She shook her head. "Back to the square," she said. "But carefully. I'm unarmed now."


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter Seventeen**

* * *

For those of you still with me, I am soooo sorry for the long delay. It's been a rough year. In lieu of a quote to describe the chapter, here's a dedication to my former employer:

 _Life is too short for shoes that hurt your feet, friends that make you feel bad about yourself and jobs that crush your soul. - Lisa Lewtan_

* * *

Her mother had made it to the square and joined the group on the stage trying desperately to save Madge. Haymitch was not among them and Katniss looked around for him frantically even as Peeta's mother and brother rushed up to greet him in relief. The scene in the square had changed radically. There was a dazed post-battlefield air as the wounded were tended and the Peacekeepers and left-behind crew rounded up and guarded. A group of men had already started taking charge of the situation - miners, in the main - and they had piled up and were counting weapons.

But as Katniss moved among them, searching for Haymitch, the energy again started sizzling among them. She both heard and felt the buzz - the eyes following her and even some of the people - and it made her swallow, anxiously. She had always operated in the shadows. She had been forced into the light - it did not come naturally to her.

At one point she stopped and looked around her, searching for anyone who looked even vaguely familiar. "Posy!" she said, lighting on a name - although the girl was grown, now. But she was tall and dark like her brother, with the same flash to her eyes.

"Katniss! It really is you! How? Why? What can I do?"

Katniss clutched gratefully at the last question. "Can you help me find Haymitch? And you - you - anyone … can you help me collect my arrows?"

"He went into the Mayor's house," said Posy. "Come on."

Katniss grabbed her and they ran into the house that she remembered well from the back, but not so much the front. She and Posy hesitated for a moment in the formal entrance, from which there were no fewer than three exits. There was a burst of noise down a hall to their right, and they moved instinctively toward it.

"Katniss," said Posy, as they walked. "Tell me - can you tell me …?"

Katniss swallowed and glanced over at the thin girl. "I don't know where Gale is. Until just a few days ago, I assumed he changed his mind and never left District 12. I waited - I waited for him. But he never came."

"I feared as much," replied Posy. "He would never have left without us. Something went wrong."

Katniss shivered at the words, disseminated without emotion. Like many other things that had been spent into the ground over the last decade, hope was chief among them. "Maybe," she said, reassuringly. "But you never know."

They stopped in front of an open office, from which they had heard the sounds. It was a small room dominated by a large desk and a huge mahogany chair, on which Haymitch sat - staring at a glowing screen. He held the receiver of a telephone - something Katniss had seen only in its dead form in the ruins of District 13 - near his ear, and he was punching the phone itself with his shaky fingers.

He looked directly up at her and his dark face was bleached pale blue by the light of the screen. "Where are your reinforcements, girl? The Capitol channel was full out alarm and calls for military engagement before they finally got wise and cut 12 off. There is no peep from 13."

Katniss frowned at him. "How do you expect me to know? I came here with two objectives - leave messages and leave with my mother. How was I to know that Peeta would be captured, that I would even care - or the precise moment that Snow would die?"

"Who's in charge there?"

"Their leader is named Coin, though I never met her - or any of them. Her lieutenant is someone named Boggs. I got permission to return to 12 and a hint that it should be now, and that came to me through my people's meetings with Boggs."

Haymitch put down the phone. "Hint? Hmmm." He eyed her for a moment - she couldn't tell if he was more bemused or more angry. "Well, then - assuming no help from 13 (very 13 of them, by the way), there are two options. They both end with the very large possibility of massive amounts of death. We just have to choose the least gory."

"We leave," said Katniss.

"The Capitol will come, no matter what. But do they bomb first, then control with troops whoever survives? Or do they send troops in and fight on the ground? Or from our perspective, do we flee the probable bombing and all die together in the wilderness? Or do we ride out the invasion, hope for the best?"

"We leave," Katniss replied thinly.

"All eight thousand of us?"

"What do you suggest?"

"I suggest 13 get here - like - yesterday - and start evacuating survivors and preparing to shoot down Capitol hovercraft. What more do they need? A dead Snow, a District in revolt … a leader to rally around. What more? Unless -."

"Unless?"

"Unless it suits them even better to sacrifice an entire District to the cause." He stood up abruptly, making her and Posy jump. "You're right. We leave - now - and take as many people with us that can be persuaded to come. And for that, we need you …."

"Or Peeta," she argued faintly. "He's pretty good with words."

"Or you," said Haymitch firmly. "Grieving widower - there's a certain energy there, yes. But the girl who died - only to return as one of the living symbols of the rebellion? No contest. And no questions - we're wasting time we don't have."

Katniss and Posy had to run to keep up with him as he exited the mayor's house and returned to the chaos of the square. The light was starting to bend toward golden: the approaching end of an extraordinary day. Katniss was suddenly tired - exhausted. She suppressed the urge to yawn. Instead she looked to the sky, searching for the death - or for the assistance - that might at any time be coming. But Haymitch was right. Everything was out of their control but their own feet - and their decision to use them.

Someone bumped her arm. She looked up in surprise - it was no face she knew; some rough miner's face - maybe someone she had gone to school with, played with in the Seam, back in the old days. "Your arrows, Mockingjay," said a voice.

She took them with a curt nod and in a swift motion had put them - notched and bloody, most of them - in their place on her back. She felt her face stiffen - as if she was overtaken by the moment, or even by the character that she was portraying. Her eyes focused on Haymitch, who was climbing the reaping stage, gesturing for her. There were still bodies there. There was still blood.

Haymitch tapped on the microphone and spoke into it, his voice gruff and strange. "The electricity is down. The fence is open. I suggest we all use it - now."

Katniss waded through the competing sounds - both agreement and protest. She suspected the miners, who had always known the rougher life, were the bulk of the former. The townsfolk - the merchants - who had lived their lives under cover of their own false sense of security - would be hard to convince. Ironically, then, they might be the ones who would suffer most.

Haymitch stepped aside for her as she took her place on the stage. She blinked into the golden light and looked at the sky, not at the crowds below her. "The time is now. There is a safe place - the place from which I came. It won't be easy - it will be a long journey. But we know that Capitol justice is swift and we know also that it can be final. Grab food - and little else! I will lead you, but I can not wait. We must flee. Now."

"Why should the Capitol punish us for what you did?" shouted a shrill voice from somewhere in the crowd.

Katniss swept the crowd with her eyes, but did not stop to make eye contact with anyone; her words were for no one in particular. "War is coming, whether or no. District 13 lives - it was never fully destroyed - and they have been preparing for this moment! They may come before the Capitol, or they may not - but, either way, we sit between two armies, and we must leave this place!"

Shock - disbelief - excitement - all mingled together in the noise that rose up in response to her words. She shook her head and turned her back on it - narrowing her eyes until she could focus on the people immediately around her. Haymitch, standing silently just before her. The Mellarks sitting together on the stage. Her mother - applying bandages to a still copiously-bleeding Madge. The mayor kneeling in his daughter's blood, his face in his hands.

"Don't abandon us!"

She looked at Haymitch and he almost smiled as he nodded at her. She only half turned around and she wasn't even fully talking into the microphone, but her voice rang out, anyway. "Then follow me to fence!"

She stumbled a little as she tried to take a step forward. Haymitch said: "You've done all you can."

"You have to get out of here," she said to her mother.

"I can't - I might still be able to save her."

Katniss bit her lip. "Mom, they are coming - this is not a joke! You can't save her from the bombs. _I promised Prim_."

Her mother blinked up at her, her pale eyes darker than usual. "I'm a healer, Katniss - I can't leave."

"Can she be moved at all?"

Katniss jumped at the soft voice, almost in her ear. Peeta had come to stand beside her, and she hadn't even noticed.

"Not far enough," replied her mother.

"Under the barracks," he said. "The basement is reinforced, like a bunker - it's meant to be a safe place for Peacekeepers to go if there is a District uprising. I don't know to what extent it can survive a Capitol invasion, but -."

"How do you know this?" asked his brother, skeptically.

Peeta smiled. "There were some advantages - to my marriage," he said, glancing at Katniss. "Information, mainly."

"That sounds like -" Katniss' mother began.

"No," she said firmly. "I can't chance it - you leave."

"I will stay," said Peeta.

" _What_?" This question came from several mouths at once.

"This is my mess," he said. He looked at Katniss, now, some intensity in his eyes warning her against saying too much. "Miss Everdeen, you may have heard - I recently lost my wife. I - I caused a lot of trouble, without meaning to. And people have died. And more will. I want to stay with Madge. I have to. It's the least I can do."

"We're wasting time," said Haymitch.

Katniss turned on him, the only outlet for her sudden anger she could legitimately take. "Then get going! Get your shit and get going. Three miles from here almost due east - there is a lake. Follow the lake through the woods to a break in the hills. Over the hills - there is an old road - broken, hard to see in places. It goes northeast - all the way to District 13."

He grabbed her arm. "It sounds like you are planning to abandon us," he growled.

"I'm going to help get Madge to this bunker. You take my mother - and I don't care if eight people follow you or eight thousand: you be out of here in thirty minutes!" She turned toward her mother. "I'll find you. We'll find you."

She turned again to face the square. The crowd had thinned, but what was left of it looked dazed and helpless. "If you plan to stay in District 12," she said, "go to your homes, lock your doors and hope the Capitol takes mercy on you! If you plan to leave - do not wait for your neighbors. Grab your family - grab food - and go to the fence! Head into the woods - follow Haymitch! I will be behind you!"

"I'll stay." This, hoarsely, from the mayor. "Just help me - get her away."

"We need you to lead the merchants," argued Haymitch. "It was what Madge wanted - it's what she agreed -."

"Haymitch," said Peeta, shaking his head. "Just go."

Peeta and Mayor Undersee lifted Madge between them and they crossed the square to the Peacekeeper's headquarters, Katniss bringing up the rear. She could not trust the people who remained in the square - everyone not fleeing now was either a loyalist or an idiot, as far as she was concerned. Sure enough, screams and the sound of breaking glass started blooming around them - the looting that followed the chaos. Some people would take advantage of it - and they would die, she thought angrily.

It took some time to find the basement. Peeta finally located the entrance under a thick rug in what had been Cray's office. Katniss decided not to think about to what use the underground chamber had been put over the years - all things considered. It was, at least, a reinforced room as Peeta had described - thick with concrete walls. A tomb, thought Katniss fretfully.

Under the thin light of a couple of candles they had taken down with them, Madge was settled into the center of the room, her rough bandages dark red with blood - her breathing shallow. Katniss touched her swollen belly, hoping to feel the second heartbeat, at least - at least. But Peeta shook his head. Apparently, the fetal death had already been determined.

"Katniss," said Peeta. "It's time for you to go."

She stood up, stared at him. "I'm not going without you."

He grabbed her arm and pulled her to a dark corner of the room. They bumped into a small table, knocking down something - some metal dish or vase; it made a sound like a hollow bell as it hit the ground.

"I can't leave a bleeding girl and an old man behind," he said in a low voice.

"There is nothing you can do," she told him. "Madge won't last the night."

He sighed against her face. "How do you …?"

"Her breath is dying."

"At least she killed him," said a ragged voice - the father's faint and empty voice. "At least she killed him. The last thing that she did. You should go - you both should go."

Katniss' heart sank. She _felt_ it drop. "I can't ask you to leave her alone," she said. "But if you stay …."

"What do you think will happen?"

Katniss licked her lips. "They'll bomb the district. As soon as they can get the hovercraft here to do it. It will take longer to get troops here. That's where we're lucky - being so far away and neglected. The bombing might happen at any time. The troops will be hours afterward, to pick through the wreckage, take care of the survivors."

"And then what?" asked Peeta.

Katniss shook her head. "I don't know. If I was District 13 … that is the moment that I would strike, I guess - score a major victory against Capitol troops when they least expect it. Then - the war starts." She shuddered. "Haymitch was right. We played right into their hands."

"What?"

She sighed. "I'll explain later," she said. She stood still and silent for a moment, trying to contain her sudden anger. Everyone she had put in harm's way. Everyone she had killed. OK - things had not gone entirely to plan. No one could have predicted exactly what had happened here today. But she had been sent to foment rebellion in District 12, and - though it had all become so accelerated, the outcome was to have been the same: an uprising in 12, followed by a crackdown, and silence from 13 - until the Capitol had come in to suppress 12, walking into a trap. With her people as bait.

Maybe, she told herself desperately, more would have been killed had she not been here to start the rebellion herself and warn the people to flee. If she had left it to Haymitch and his allies …. She shook her head. No excuses. No outs. She had to salvage what she could, and that meant - at the very least - making sure that enough of her people had fled the district and could be guided to safety.

"I do," she said. "I have to go. Before the bombs come. I'm sorry - so sorry. Peeta - please come with me."

She felt his hesitation - the energy of his kindness and pity, his sense of duty - buzz against her skin.

"Go," urged Mayor Undersee. "You might be able to persuade your friends and neighbors to go - if they are hesitating to follow Haymitch."

It was the argument that she had been about to make, but she was glad the old man had forestalled her. It released Peeta from the sense of obligation - an official decree. Peeta took her hand and squeezed it.

His face - as they closed the basement door behind them and moved the rug back over it - was gray and horrified. She felt it, too - that they had buried two people alive. Horrible. But awful things were about to happen - things that would be hard to forget, no matter how things turned out. "I woke up this morning," he said faintly. "Prepared to die in the Capitol."

"The Capitol may have you, yet," she answered.

He looked at her. "Not if you are here with me."

They hurried back through the barracks and toward the front entrance - stepping over the corpses of the first Peacekeepers she had killed this morning. The light was red now with the approaching evening. This long day was finally almost over … and it was really just beginning. "OK," she said.

And then the first bomb dropped.


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter Eighteen**

He has gone

He has forgotten

He took my lute and my shell of crystal -

He never looked back -

H.D. "Calypso"

* * *

Peeta - who had just been thinking to himself that there would be some inevitable cosmic penalty for leaving the Undersees behind, and so had been half-expecting disaster - was the first to react. He pulled Katniss back from the doorway. She - perhaps still just stunned to see her plans foiled - was slow to follow.

"No," she said. "No."

Outside, flares of red and orange. And screams - not the startled, frightened screams of earlier in the day; these were screams of intense pain. "We have to go back down. There is no safe place on the surface."

She resisted him as he pulled her back toward the inside of the house. "I can't go underground," she said. "I won't die underground!"

He was a little stronger than she was, and he had the traction - and the presence of mind - that she didn't. So, despite her protests, they were headed back toward Cray's office. Still, it would be helpful if she would cooperate, he thought grimly.

When they got to the carpet and the door to the basement, she stood still, watching him frantically push the barricades aside. Nor did she protest when he insisted she go down. As the darkness closed back around them, she said, "What did we do?"

He paused on the reply. For most of his life he had played things safe. Except for a handful of times when he just couldn't. And pain had inevitably been the outcome - punishment had followed. But it had been worth it.

He wasn't sure if this was one of those times. It could only be known at the end - an end neither of them might see. But he answered: "Nothing that wouldn't have happened eventually. How did you put it? - 'Eventually the breeze gathers into a gale, and blows you away if you are not prepared for it.'"

"We were too late," said the mayor. Peeta jumped at his words - he had almost forgotten they weren't alone.

He and Katniss made their way back to the pale circlet of candlelight that surrounded Madge and her father.

"Yes," said Katniss.

"This is the first wave," Peeta said, biting his lip against despair. "Probably just a few Capitol planes that were available nearby. A lot of people will have followed Haymitch out of the fence before it started, and there will be a lot of survivors of this initial bombing who can flee before the next wave. That," he added with a glance toward Katniss, "is when we take our chances."

"They won't bomb Victor's Village," said Undersee.

"What?"

"They won't target it, anyway - that is Capitol property. And if Peacekeepers are coming, that is where they will base."

Peeta's mind whirled. After this bombing, they would have a little bit of time to collect whomever remained, and then … he winced as another bomb fell - it felt almost on top of them - and the ground shook. No use strategizing, he thought grimly. These might be his last moments alive.

He turned his attention instead to the girl next to him, who was shivering slightly. She truly was giving way to her fear. "You were - magnificent out there, Katniss," he said. "I think that was the bravest thing I've ever seen."

"You weren't bad, yourself," she answered, though tightly.

"And Madge," he added, moving to touch the dying girl on her arm. "I'm surrounded by absolute heroes."

Madge's arm was still warm - though not unnaturally so. Her breathing, which had been shallow before, was softer now and more regular.

"Why do you fear it so much?" he asked Katniss. "Being underground? Can't you just imagine - that you are in the cave?"

She shook her head. "My father died in the mines. Blown up underground. His body - it was never recovered. I still think about it all the time."

"Of course," he answered softly.

There was a lull in the noise outside, and they paused, listening as seconds stretched into minutes. Then another blast and the walls around them rattled again.

"How much longer?" she asked.

"Not much," he said reassuringly, as if he knew. "Mr. Undersee," he said, without really having anything worth saying - just trying to fill the silence with something other than the sounds of the bombing. "Do you remember that Peacekeeper - Darius - who went to the Capitol for murdering the Everdeen girls?"

"Of course, I - oh. Of course. No one believed it, and I guess, obviously, it wasn't even true …."

"Right. Do you know of any reason that Cray would have had - to get rid of Darius? Melly - my wife, that is - she knew something about it, but I'm not sure if she knew the actual reason, or just suspected it."

"No, I - why? Cray's gone now, anyway, so we probably won't ever know."

"I'm a prey to curiosity," Peeta grinned. "All that time in prison, I was trying to think of something that is even worse than his affection for minors - or his crimes before he came to Twelve: these were all known. Even the potential rigging of the reapings doesn't seem to fit the seriousness of setting up Darius. Although - perhaps Cray just had random fits of awfulness. He disliked my father, for no reason that I'm aware of."

"Oh, no - he had his reasons," said the mayor. "Your father was one of the last remnants of the previous uprising: the one that ended in the miners being vaporized in the mines that winter. Merchants could not be got rid of as easily as miners, so he had to bide his time."

"What?" cried Katniss. "What uprising? I don't remember anything about that - I was eleven! Surely …."

"It's always quiet in the formative stages. That's as far as it got."

"My father - was involved?" choked Peeta, as a horrible realization dawned on him.

"Bread," said the mayor, wistfully, "was one of the traditional means of secret communication back in the dark days. The Mellarks have a long history within Panem's various rebellions. And yes, one of his children was always destined for the arena, once it was discovered and squashed. As was my own daughter - had Theoph not liked the look of her. It is our children who take the rebels' punishments - now, as it ever was."

"Oh - my god."

"And it was Cray that Theoph came to District 12 to watch. Not the rest of us. Perhaps you are right - if Cray held Capitol secrets and they knew that someone else knew them, too …."

But Cray was forgotten for the moment. Peeta could only think of his father - quiet, gentle - how rapidly he had aged once his second son had died in the Games. Peeta's last day at home had been the day that his remains had been brought home in a box. There had been horror in the house - his mother screaming; his father collapsing - the first appearance of the heart problems that would shorten his life - and Peeta, haunted by guilt and sorrow, knowing of no one but himself to blame … had run off toward the fence. Intending to leave the District and die in the woods. He had got no further than the Meadow.

He didn't notice the long silence, being distracted by his sad memories, but eventually Katniss nudged him. "It's been awhile," she said.

"How long?"

"Fifteen minutes - at least."

"Are you sure?"

She grunted. "I've lived without clocks for a long time."

He was so anxious to get out of here, himself, that he chose to take that as good evidence. He got to his feet.

"To the Village, then?" she said.

He nodded. "Collecting as many as we can, yes," he replied. "Mayor …?"

Katniss darted before them, a little too quickly for his comfort, as he and Mr. Undersee gathered Madge between them and made their way up into a dizzying light. Luck made their ascent possible - the walls were largely intact around them, though adjoining rooms had collapsed in on themselves. Returning through the front entrance was not possible. Katniss had to pick her way through the rubble and find a way to climb up several layers of broken boulders until she had made her way out. Then she turned around and guided them to her with encouraging shouts and an occasional hand pulling them up.

Peeta was out of breath as he and the Mayor set Madge down on the ground and it was a moment before he had the chance to look around him. The town square had been targeted by the bombing - the Mayor's house and the Justice Building were, simply, gone. Most of the surrounding shops were either dissolved or were on fire, spitting black smoke into the bright afternoon sky. The building they had sheltered in - the Peacekeeper's headquarters - was largely spared. On purpose, Peeta thought.

Then they started to come into focus - the bodies. Horribly disfigured, most of them. Black and burning, in pieces. Or crushed by falling debris, their blood a halo around their corpses. The blood was the only color, he thought. The dust from the destroyed buildings had otherwise blanketed the entire town square in a pallid gray.

"Hello!" shouted Katniss. "If you can hear me, follow us to the Village!"

Twice more she shouted it, her voice echoing strangely in the empty square. Peeta thought grimly that any of the survivors would most likely be those who had not sought escape in the first place, and perhaps not the friendliest of allies - but they did have to try, right?

In fact, they found a small crowd waiting for them at the Village gates.

.

.

.

Some had reasoned for themselves that the Village would go untargeted. Some had made their way there, frankly, to loot Haymitch's house, now that the bombing had stopped. True to Peeta's suspicions, they were none too friendly toward the two of them, the instigators of all this ruin - but they were cowards and Katniss was grim and powerful in her dark suit and her dark expression. Looters were quickly turned to collecting the food from Haymitch's pantry and the group, resentful but convinced, now, of the necessity, was soon streaming toward the fence and escape.

Peeta settled the mayor and his daughter - still stubbornly clinging to life - in Haymitch's bedroom, with enough canned meat and vegetables for a couple of days.

"Are you sure?" asked Peeta, uneasily. "It's even odds if you are rescued by the Capitol or executed. Madge's attack on Theoph must have been caught on film, if not aired live."

"What else can I do?"

Peeta glanced out a window; Katniss was still urging people on, her agitation to flee so evident. He gave the mayor a last pat on the arm and headed outside. His mind was racing - this was _too much_ , everything that had happened in such a short span of time: the bear trap and the dead girl and the fever and the virgin skin and the hallucinations in the jail cell and the blood on the stage and the bombs over his head. He tended to live in his memories, and the most recent ones were just - too much.

She was clearly in the moment. For her, this was the last necessary step for her to get out of this place she had abandoned long ago and return back to the rebellion with which she had made a new home. She might mourn the town and dread the danger, but her eye was on the road ahead.

"You should get out in front," he told her. "I'll poke at the people at the rear. I'll likely be as slow - my leg is still sore when I put weight on it."

She eyed him unhappily. "There are almost a hundred - some very young, some wounded. You need to make sure they are less slow than they are inclined to be."

"I'm sure none of us are eager to be bombed, shot or caught," he told her with a smile.

They stared at each other, paralyzed in this moment that by everything that had ever been right in the world was meant for a kiss: in public, their relationship, or whatever it was, was a secret. He was a grieving widower and she - a stranger, a ghost, a myth. It was not possible to make the declaration of an embrace, even a small one. He wished he had pulled her aside for a moment in Haymitch's house. Though - even if there had been a moment to seize, and despite all the very real and solid things that he felt for her - almost the last thing she had told him was that he _might_ have been an option, in different circumstances. No more, no less. It was very possible that the entirety of their romance would remain sealed away in that one night - that one frozen moment of time.

He lived in his memories. She moved on.

He swallowed. "What are you waiting for, mockingjay?" he asked softly.

Because that was the last thing she had said to him: that she came back to 12 as a symbol of resistance and hope. For now, for the moment, that was all of her role and purpose.

"Nothing," she replied, turning away.

He watched her sprint up the line. It was the right place for her, as the rear was the right place for him. Here, indeed, were the wounded and the mothers with small children. And they knew him - they knew he could be trusted. If they didn't know him personally, they knew he was the soft-headed fool who had risked his life to bring flowers to his dying wife. It gave one a certain cache.

He was the last at the gate of Victor's Village and was just about to cross the threshold when the cries began. They were so sharp and pained that not only he but a number of people ahead of him turned in startlement and terror. He waved them on.

"Peeta … no …."

Peeta pushed up his sleeves and knelt on the floor. "What's going on?"

As if in response, Madge's body contorted and her eyelids fluttered as she cried out.

"Holy ... shit," he said. "Is she - in labor?"

"I think so," gasped Mr. Undersee, his face shining with his sweat.

I knew it, thought Peeta, grimly. I _knew_ it. There was something unfinished about this whole business with Madge. Thank goodness I got Katniss out of here.

"Do you have any idea - what to do?" he asked.

The mayor shook his head. "Well - I've seen normal childbirth before, but …."

Peeta glanced once toward the open door - out of this room, through the house, back out into the sunlight and through the fence, and the next fence. The only real option, if the other choice was to participate in this ceremony of death masquerading as the exercise of life. But that is the thing about choices - whether they are cut off by your government or by your own conscience, they rarely actually exist. One must flee to the wild to have such freedoms.

Madge regained a glassy, terrified consciousness just as they could hear the returning sounds of the hovercraft. She woke to her father's hand desperately covering her mouth and Peeta clutching her knees, blood all over his hands. She wriggled spastically at this sight, but her one burst of energy drained her, and she collapsed immediately back into a faint.

Peeta fought against nausea and steeled himself to the worst task he had ever performed in his life - wrapping the undersized corpse in a sheet the layers of which were soaked through with his mother's blood and whatever else had been expelled with the placenta. There was no time to clean or bury. There was no time to take the necessary care. Behind them, the now-familiar _whoosh_ of the hovercraft blades was growing loud, like an incoming windstorm.

"I'm sorry," he said out loud to no one in particular.

"Will she - live - do you think?"

Peeta stood, leaving the bloody shroud on the floor at Madge's feet. It was so undignified, he thought ruefully, even for Theoph's son. He shook his head. "Anything's possible, I guess. She lost a bit more blood."

"Thank you, Peeta - a thousand times over. I could not have done this myself."

Peeta nodded faintly. Now that the medical crisis had passed, his senses were filled with the engine sound of descending aircraft. As the noise increased, over the loudspeakers there were voices piped out into the air - demanding surrender. True to his prediction, the bombings were over and the invasion beginning.

"Peeta - you need to get out, now. Make a run for it. Don't go back through town. You've done enough for us. Whatever is coming, we'll take."

Before he was almost aware of it, Peeta found himself running as fast as possible around the perimeter of Victor's Village - toward the back fence, the way he had left District 12 before. This meant an uncertain path once out - alone, he was not sure he could find his way back to the lake. He could only run east into the trees, and hope for the best.

He had made it to the garbage dump when he heard himself addressed specifically.

" _Halt! You are ordered to halt! Anyone departing District 12 will be shot on sight._ "

He panted as he increased his speed. Choices - choices - he knew there were none here. The difference between an immediate death from above and a lingering one in the hands of the Capitol? At best, miniscule. The thing that got him was the idea of all the others - Katniss and Haymitch, his mother and brother (assuming they had survived) and all the people who had woken this morning on a regular old summer day to find themselves under fire by the Capitol before the afternoon had even broken the sky. There was no way they would all escape this fate.

A roar and a sonic boom shook the world and he stumbled to the ground. Rolling over onto his back, he looked up into a sky dark with aircraft, terrifyingly close - he could read the serial numbers on their bellies. Then there was a flash of fire - not in his direction, but arcing across the sky. One of the hovercraft was caught in the light and it dropped suddenly out of the sky, blazing with fire as it crashed down into the center of District 12.

Peeta stood. The fleet of hovercraft was like a dark, metallic net between himself and the sun - the shafts of golden light struck the earth in a strange pattern. Otherwise, the sky was quite dark and heavy. There was another boom - he swayed in response despite his surer footing - and another vessel was knocked out of the sky. And he was in a desperately new danger: this time the wreckage fell much nearer, in the general direction of the mines. He took off again, his pace the more frantic because he had no idea what was going on.

He threw his arms over his head as he ran, for all the good it would do. The sounds of explosions and shrieking metal were punctuated by the sporadic flares from overhead. It was terrible - this sense that death was a random drop of metal or fire from the sky above him. The fence seemed far away and no matter how fast he ran, it did not ever seem to get closer.

When he finally got to it, he did not bother to unknit the loose links he had slipped through before. He could not bear to stop. By this time, the sky was not just noise and fire, but a shrieking confusion - the formation broken as the rogue hovercraft swooped down to fire, or to dodge the belated returning fire. He frantically scrambled up and over - he jumped to the ground and did not even stop at the pain that shot up his damaged leg, but ran in as straight a line as he could toward the woods.

"Peeta!" He heard his name - somehow the voice was screaming loud enough to be heard over the din above. He knew the voice, but he dared not answer. She should be well away from here, he thought, angrily. "Peeta!"

He stopped a moment, tried to pinpoint the direction. He would not draw her to him, but perhaps he could follow it to safety. Damn, the open field between the fence and the trees had never before looked so naked. She had better not - she had better not ….

The last explosion he heard was right at his left side. The ground convulsed all around him, the earth spat up - soil, rocks, roots - and he was thrown violently to the ground and blacked out.


End file.
